I would say that that is true, the comment about making it easier, in that context.

I guess what I would mean by easier, is the learning curve of the beginning of the game. Not the game itself. So there isnt a need for a singular tutorial/newbie race. I like the way you have your character creation set up but do not know if mine will ever be quite as evolved as that. It sure would be good, but who knows. For now though the aim would be to make each race enjoyable, bring something unique, and be both fun and practical for the whole game.

-Syn

Oh, that has an easy answer. You want experienced players to jump ahead; no need to put them through the newbie phase again. Or, you want players who like challenges to be able to choose a challenging initial path.


I think you're being overly harsh here. The "human" race in fantasy tends to be constructed in our image. What special powers or abilities do we have? Maybe somebody should let me know I've been missing something… :wink:

The same option could be given without restricting it to a race, though, is my point.



Some of the more interesting examples that I've seen are:

- humans are better problem-solvers
- humans are better inventors
- humans are more diverse
- humans are more diligent
etc.

While these traits may not seem on par with "resistant to fire" or "herculean strength" at first glance, it really depends on your particular game and how you interpret these abilities and incorporate them into your game-play.

A fairly good example (at the risk of straying to another genre) is how Starcraft handles humans.

Hey depending on who you talk to, telepathy, telekinesis, spirit projection… we can do that too, if your uninhibited and have those gifts, of course.

Though as Drrck mentions, most games present humans with more logic driven 'abilities'. This isnt to say that a human is smarter then another race, but that due to our short life span (in comparison to the standard entourage in fantasy games) we are more adept at using the time we have in creative and 'explosive' ways. We are quick to drink of life, and throw ourselves into situations, we are curious, can be superiorly loyal, while not. Many games incorporate humanity quite well into a set of special abilities that we may not see in real life per se, but in the fantasy setting make sense, or in that particular game come together quite well.

I think if you really are going to design a solid character process that something like KaVir's system would be a real boon and allow people to select some nice and easy premade packages, and other people to create whatever they want.

If you have a pretty simple race/class system, I still prefer making all of the races fun and unique, but none of them 'newbie' or tutorial over another. Have better introductory areas, and an 'easier' learning curve.

-Syn

From a pure stat standpoint, no other race will ever quite match up to Humans on my game. The design isn't just to short change them in exchange for making them easy, the challenge was to promote people playing them without making them overpowered or directed too strongly at any one archetype. There are ways, if played right, the Humans should match up to other classes end game despite not having any inherit combat abilities. Again, they get +1 to each stat that no other race gets, they get additional practices (or AP) that no other race gets, the increased learn rate could also be another easier way to save on AP and thus get even higher stats. End game, aside from more opportunity for more AP (and thus more skills or stats) than any other race has, they also can wear EQ 10 levels higher than their own level which other races are limited to at-level eq. They get to level 100, every other race will be wearing level 100 EQ, while Humans will be the only characters able to access 110 EQ. Their scavenge/move-find abilities allow them to save the money not only by getting more from kills, but also on potions as they will just stumble upon them, and more gil = more eq and more opportunities for stronger things.

No other race has any sort of insane immunity or resistance to anything. To contract, here is the Dwarf ability list:

Level   1: Swipe (bigger they are… harder they fall)
Level  20: Appraise (identifies objects)
Level  40: Temper (enhances weapons or armor like enchant spell)
level  60: Hoard (more gil from kills, better deals at shops)
Level  80: Persist (temp increases Wil and Def/MDef)
Level 100: Flash-Bang (explosive fire/sound damage attack)

Each race has their perks, but I don't think it's fair to say just because a race is considered the easy mode, that they will be necessarily disadvantaged end game. All players coming in have access to help files that will allow them to consider their race options fully, and if someone reaches end game and feels like they made a mistake by picking the wrong race because it's not "1337" enough for their tastes, then ultimately that's their problem. It's not entirely our focus to make it so that at level 100, you can put any race and class combination against any other race and class combination in a straight on, head to head fight, and they will basically reach a stalemate. Certain races and certain classes will be naturally better at different things. I think one of the problems with many MUDs is when they try to "balance" or "equal" things out so much, there's very little difference in the experience of playing one race or one class to another, and it's all basically 'bash' damage with a different echo.

Going back to the Morrowind/Oblivion references from earlier, I've found my experiences in playing a stealth oriented character is a completely different game than playing a warrior type. As a Warrior type, generally I'm rushing in swinging, cutting down everything in my path. As a stealth character, I'm hiding in the shadows, picking people off from a distance with magical items or with projectile weapons, and only getting in close when I have to. Completely different play experiences.

However on most games, you find that playing a Mage or a Fighter is basically the same game experience. As a Fighter, you are typing 'bash' or 'cleave' or what have you every so many rounds, and as a Mage, you are typing 'cast fireball' every so many rounds, and while the echoing and the mechanics differ slightly, it's basically the same grind with different window dressing. But for the sake of "balance" and "equality" very few MUD designers seem willing to step away from that formula because they fear players will whine and complain that '___ class' isn't as good as another because in a one on one, face to face fight, they can't win. I want my Thief players to have to incorporate stealth, strategy, and clever use of items and other utilities in order to take out a fighter. In my opinion, in a straight, "fair" match up between a Thief and a Fighter, a Thief -should- lose. Will inexperienced or non-clever Thief players whine that Thieves suck? Most likely, yes. Will an experienced and clever Thief likely be able to exploit other's weaknesses and play the class very effectively to do what Thieves do best? Hopefully. But in the end, I don't think every class has to be as combat oriented as a Fighter. Fighters are born, bred, and live their lives to do harm. Thieves are just that, they steal. So I don't think it's a terrible thing to have some classes more combat capable than others so long as the less combat capable classes have other things they excel at which make them useful.

Maybe I'm taking a bit more of a D&D approach to the way I'm looking at this. How many of you have had a Bard or a Cleric in your party that would have gotten owned if it was them going up against that Dragon rather than your Barbarian and Fighter? How many of you who played a Barbarian or Fighter might would have had a rather short campaign if it wasn't for that Cleric healing you or bringing you back to life after getting killed?

Every class, every race, they have their places, I just think that when people focus too much on making them too "equal" in terms of combat, they miss out on a chance to stand out from the others and be unique and have their own niche in the game.

And yeah, I know I kinda went off on a tangent about classes… I do feel races should be a little bit more of a level playing field than classes, because you don't want too strongly paired race/class combinations (well, unless you do), but I think some of the same reasoning applies, because some races will simply just be better suited for certain tasks than others.

Anyway, I gotta get going.

Why "balance" races at all? No, seriously… what's the point of having different races if they aren't, well, different?

I've always felt that each race should be suited to a particular set of skills, and unsuited to another set of skills, and fairly neutral to everything else.

If you take the classic model, ogres tend to be strong and dumb, so they make good fighters, marginal clerics, weak mages, and weak rogues. HOW you choose to implement this is up to you. Some games make your character attributes (Strength, Dexterity, etc..) factor greatly into your skills. Other games don't weigh them so heavily and merely make training costs (money and/or experience) greater for skills which are difficult to learn. Others still will just outright disallow classes or skills which don't suit you.

Humans tend to become the average joe character race. They aren't bad at anything, they aren't good at anything. Sometimes they get a bonus to experience, but when all is said and done, they end up being boring. Personally, I would either remove humans from the game entirely, or make everyone human and give them different cultural backgrounds to specialize.

It also makes a difference what kind of model you're using for attributes. The classic DikuMUD follows AD&D rules, and thus your stats range from 3 to 18, and can typically reach as high as 25 with enough magic. BatMUD's system is open-ended, with everyone being able to spend experience to raise their stats… racial differences have more of an impact at the start, because as you gain experience, you can always balance out your shortcomings.

Because "balanced" doesn't mean "the same". If one race is superior to the others, few people will play the others (and those who do will be at a disadvantage); you might as well not have bothered implementing races at all.

This is the very essence of race balancing. You weigh the pros and cons of races against each other and get a balance between them, with humans generally being in the dead center.

Exactly.

To some degree, that was my point. Most games these days seem to hold "balance" as the holy grail of design, and sacrifice diversity, strategy, and even playability to hammer the last nail of balance into the coffin of character creation.

Put another way, take any two characters and pit them against each other in PvP. That seems to be what most people look at when discussing balance. Why should a halfling fighter be expected to have a 50/50 chance against an elven wizard? In strategy games, it takes quite a few swordsman to fight off a small cavalry group, yet a handful of spearmen can do it with ease. The units aren't balanced with respect to one another, but the game itself is balanced because everything can be countered, if you figure out how to do it.

Likewise, to my way of thinking, if you roll a dwarf character, you're choosing a strategy. You know you aren't going to be able to move as quickly, you're going to be a good tank and an ok cleric. More importantly, you have to pick your battles. That's, perhaps, where many MUD's fall down. In an ideal game, you'll find a good group with complementary skills to your own, so the fact that you (a dwarf) can't do magic or really use ranged weapons doesn't prevent you from fighting the flying undead legions because the elven mage is there to help. Since that ideal game doesn't happen so often, the area designers need to provide enough content so the dwarf has things to fight that HE is good at fighting, and at the same level, there will be things for the other races to fight that THEY are good against.

Where most people complain about lack of balance is when they rolled a dwarf, and then they are forced to fight flying creatures which take half damage form physical attacks for 10 levels, because that's all there is (or anything else is "worth less"). When they see an elf rip through the area in half the time, they head for the forums to whine about balance issues. In reality, it's often lack of diversity in content issues, or players not thinking and assuming everything in the game is the same.

This is a good point, but it falls apart when you consider the fact that a player in a strategy game can choose to make any (or all) of the different types of units in order to counter his opponent.

In a MUD, you don't get the option to alter your race/classes to counter your opponent.

I think quixadhal is making a crucially important point that is too often overlooked. Balanced doesn't necessarily have to mean that every single pair of options is equal; it could also mean that various combinations are equal. Perhaps it is to be expected that some classes steamroll over others. Balance could also be thought of as rock-paper-scissors (gross oversimplification but bear with me): X beats Y, Y beats Z, and Z beats X. Now you actually have to worry about things like strategy and tactics.

Of course, this assumes that players actually play as groups instead of trying to do everything all by their lonesome all of the time. So, this kind of balancing assumes a different form of play. But isn't the whole point of multiplayer games to be multiplayer?

Just something to think about…

It's one thing to encourage playing in groups, but using the rock/scissors/paper approach to balance would all but force it. In general I don't think balancing a game in this manner works unless you leave options open to the player, and choosing a race really can only be done once in the lifetime of a character (unless you have some off-the-wall type of game).

That said, I think this style of balancing already exists in most MUDs; only in the form of skills/spells rather than races.

Well, I did say that RPS was a gross oversimplification, so don't put too much stock in that analogy literally. The point was that instead of balancing individual pairs, you can take a more holistic approach to balancing.

Also, on another note, I'm not sure how much I like the idea of races being hugely different to begin with. The main reason for that is that they are so immutable, and allow for no player intervention or character individualization. (This is also why I'm not a big fan of the class approach.) Furthermore, differentiating races too strongly based on ability scores will tend to segregate classes based on race: all mages are elven, all thieves are halfling, etc. But I don't think this point is relevant to the current topic so I won't elaborate on it, just wanted to throw it out there.

Well if you use systems like what KaVir describes, or how Shadowbane approached races and classes there is much more character 'intervention' which has somewhat been discussed earlier in the topic. You can read those posts for what was discussed about the races, and ability scores and whatnot :)

I designed the original God Wars in such a way that some classes were particularly effective against others, but I have to say I wasn't very happy with the end result. It's extremely frustrating knowing that you can't beat certain characters, even if you're a more skilled player than your opponent, simply because their class is designed to be able to beat yours.



As you increase the number of choices available to each character, a certain degree of RPS is extremely difficult to avoid. But I think it's important to stress the care that should be taken if you really want to encourage strategy and tactics - in particular, every class needs to have options for rock, paper and scissors; if you always beat someone because you're paper and they're rock, then strategy and tactics become irrelevant.



Multiplayer doesn't necessarily mean cooperative. Highly competitive games, in particular, often emphasise solo play.



Personally I'm in favour of making races feel very different to each other, and I think such a difference requires at least some degree of mechanical support. When races consist of nothing more than a couple of stat modifiers, it hardly seems worth bothering to add them at all; you might as well just let people add an extra couple of stat points.

There's also no reason why races and classes can't be just as mutable or individualised as a raceless/classless system - in fact, the classes in my mud are exactly that. You can redesign your character freely, changing everything except your name and class, and each class supports a wider range of different builds and playing styles than I've ever seen in any classless mud.



That's certainly a danger, and one I mentioned earlier in the thread. In my opinion, every race/class combination should be equally viable. Perhaps elven fighters are more accurate, while dwarven fighters are stronger and halfling fighters faster, but in my opinion each should be equally effective overall.

While you make a good point about balance - that is, that one should try to balance things across the game as a whole rather than in every conceivable specific situation individually - I don't agree with this philosophy on race. Under a system like this, the choice of race is, to all intents and purposes, exactly the same decision as the choice of class. If all warriors are going to end up as dwarves or ogres and all mages will be elves, why bother to have the choice of class and the choice of race as separate decisions at all? Why not just roll it into a single choice? (Do you want to be a dwarf warrior, an ogre warrior, or an elf mage?)

If you're going to have race and class as separate components of a character, I think they need to be much more orthogonal than that: perhaps, as KaVir suggested earlier, dwarf warriors are stronger, while elven warriors are more dexterous and human warriors are more cunning; in other words, each possible race/class combination has something to be said for it. Or perhaps the abilities conferred on the character by race are simply quite independent of those provided by class; maybe some races can breathe underwater, some can fly, etc. - abilities that are useful regardless of class.

I would like that better. If races are just a question of stat points, why not just give people stat points to distribute themselves as they see fit and let the race name be an appearance thing. Perhaps there is a desire to have some degree of realism and not have halflings as strong as orcs, but …

No, but you DO get to pick your battles (PvP and wandering ambushes aside). If you're playing a race which is known to be weak against giants and strong against kobolds, and you're soloing, wouldn't you head for the kobolds?

Knowing your character's strengths and weaknesses should be just as important as knowing how to play, or where the "ph4t l00t" is. In particular, weaknesses often are removed by grouping. If you're string against giants and you team with someone who is strong against kobolds, suddenly you counter each others weaknesses and bolster each others strengths. The whole becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Too many game designs of late have focused on making the game forgiving of mistakes and lowering the barrier to entry, but at the cost of dumbing down the system. I don't advocate making the game unplayable for any race or class, but allowing all possible combinations to beat every bit of content means the players don't ever experience fear, and without fear, how can victory be anything but cheap?

Put another way, when I started mudding, I would explore a new area and often had "flee" pre-typed in case something ugly jumped out from the screen at me. On many of the muds I saw later, I don't think people even knew there WAS a flee command.

I think that's part of it. To my mind, it makes no sense that a halfling warrior should be on equal footing with an orc warrior, assuming they're both comparable in training and equipment. However, the halfling may have learned to fight in a very different style than the orc, and so it would become harder to call the contest.

To some degree, that could be implemented by having different skills in orcish fighter guilds than halfling fighter guilds. The question would then become, how would each fare against a comparable human fighter? For me, it isn't a problem if one has a much easier time than the other… provided that something else in the world has the reverse. So if orcs can kill humans easier than halfings can do so, perhaps halflings have an easier time killing elves than orcs do. The smart halfling player will realize they should hunt elves instead of humans.

Yeah, but as KaVir pointed out, that doesn't make it any less frustrating knowing you'll never be able to win a battle against someone of that race, no matter how skilled you are.



I agree, but I think this facet is best left up to skills/spells rather than race.