Member Discussions

I'm working out a new system for a new game project, and I'd
like to hear thoughts on whether you'd find this sort of
system fun. If not, why?

I suppose you could call it a pseudo-classless system, or a
custom class system. There are no rigid game classes.
Rather, there are 10 class areas (4 of which are crafting or
resource gathering related), from which you can choose
specific abilities.

For instance, if you want to learn to pick locks, you can
spend points acquired as you increase your experience score
to learn to pick basic locks. In this case, there are
Locksmithing I - Locksmithing V abilities, and each level
requires the previous to be trained first. The higher you go
up, the more advanced the locks are that you can pick.
Similarly, the ability to harvest a certain wood, smith a
specific weapon, or cast a specific spell are all abilities
in other class areas.

You can mix and match as you see fit. Water down your
character to be a jack of all trades, or stay true to a
specific concept and really nail down all the niches of that
class. Characters would have enough points over their
lifetime to max out two class areas (with a few points left
over.)

There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to this
system, but with over 500,000 possible unique combinations
of abilities, it's certainly a system that lends itself
toward being less "cookie-cutter". Note that this does not
encompass skills that support your abilities, such as a
weapon skill to determine how well you use an ability that
does a sword attack, etc. Skills are entirely separate from
this system.

Additionally, characters would gain access to class titles
based on meeting a specific number of trained skills in
various class areas. So, you are in a sense building your
class by builing your ability list, rather than choosing a
class and gaining a list of abilities based on the class
choice.

I'm curious why skills and abilities are separate? Why for
example would a warrior want to train their lunge a great
deal, but not their spear skill? If they logically would want
to train both, why not make them part of the same system? It
seems like it would make things easier to understand and
develop.

If you were talking about skills and abilities as trained in
really different ways, I can see the reasoning; check out God
Wars 2 for example, with its skills and talents.

Thanks for your reply, Idealiad.

The skills and abilities are separate for a few reasons.
Skills offer one way for someone who can perform a function
to be able to perform that function better - a way to
improve.

Additionally, not all abilities can cover areas that skills
do. For instance, how well you can hit a target with a spell
you know. This could be just a simple matter of a level or
atat/attribute check, but skills offer a little more
complexity.

Finally, characters can improve their skills by performing
those skills, and thus there's more activity to fill your
time with, to reduce the feeling of a grind. There's many
facets of your character to improve, rather than just an
experience score.

In essence, abilities you learn determine -what- you can do,
and skills determine -how well- you can do those things.

What are your thoughts about being able to construct your
class by choosing abilities, versus a classic list of
defined class with a defined list of abilities?

I'm completely confused with the vocabulary. Usually abilities refer to ability scores; Strength, Intelligence, &c. and skills refer to stuff that your character can do like Open Lock. At least in D&D and RPGs inspired from it. Yet you call skills abilities, and you say skills are something different but I don't really see what it is, so perhaps you need to give more examples of skills.

(Comment added by MECHFrost on Wed Apr 14 16:20:05 2010)

Edit: would your skills look like this? http://www.d20srd.org/indexes/feats.htm

Your system looks pretty classic then, I would think all classless system pretty much work like that.

Sorry for the confusion. Let me lay out the system more in
D&D terms.

First, you have no actual class. You assemble three things
to flesh out your character:

1. Ability scores like strength, etc. Acquired by allocating
points received as your experience score increases.

2. Class features (this would be like backstab for a D&D
thief, turn undead for a D&D cleric etc.) You can mix and
match as you wish from the list of features available, but
some advanced features require you first have a less
advanced prerequisite feature. These are acquired via points
you allocate as your experience score increases.

3. Skills - just like D&D skills, this determines how well
you can do certain things. You may be able to pick a lock,
but with low locksmithing skill, you'll do poorly at it.
These are learned by use, not via allocated points.

So, having a backstab feature means you can use a backstab
attack. Having a high weapon or stealth skills means you can
backstab more effectively, and having a high dexterity or
strength may mean your backstab inflicts a more serious
injury.

My question is whether this sounds like an enjoyable system
versus a system like D&D where you can only pick class
features from your own class (or limited multiclassing). In
a sense, I suppose this is a sort of lawless form of
multiclassing where you can mix and match without limit
other than prerequisite features.

It should be noted, though, that the class feature list
includes tons of stuff that many players would consider
basic to many games. Harvesting resources, crafting an item,
etc. Some players might be put off by not being able to
forage plants or mine metals without first learning a class
feature, but others might find this attractive as it further
limits how many in the community will take part in creating
useful items.

I use something very similar pre-classing. Characters are primarily assembled from the following:

1. Stats. A starting character has 50 points to distribute among their 8 stats.

2. Talents (such as Assassin Training which grants backstab, Faith which grants cleric-like spells, etc). You begin with 3 talents and unlock a few more as you progress, but you can never have more than a tiny fraction of those available. Many talents require specific stats, skills or other talents, and some talents block each other.

3. Skills. Your "common" abilities, these automatically increase through use.

So having Assassin Training means you can backstab, having a high weapon skill means you can backstab more effectively, and having a high Discipline stat means your backstab inflicts a more serious injury.

Your talents also determine your title, much as you mentioned in your first post - so a character with Assassin Training would have the title "Assassin", while a character with Iron Fists would have the title "Monk" and a character with Magically Gifted would have the title "Magician", etc.

Later on, players can join a class, at which point they use exp to train their stats and powers. Powers are class-specific abilities arranged in a skill-web much like talents, and there are a lot of interdependancies between powers and talents. Players can only max a few powers, although they can spread their points around if they wish, so there's a huge amount of diversity even among members of the same class.

Note that my classes represent supernatural archtypes, not professions, so their powers are things that wouldn't make sense from a classless perspective (eg a vampire shouldn't be able to grow a huge scorpion-like tail, a werewolf shouldn't be able to transform into a cloud of bats, etc).

After several years of playtesting my view is that the system works very well, although I think that's mostly because players are able to freely rearrange their abilities. With so much choice, I've found it's unavoidable that some paths will be more effective than others, so there's a lot of potential for players to make mistakes.

Very interesting, thanks for the response, KaVir. I'm glad you
clarified what you meant by classes - I would have thought of
them in the typical profession-esque sort of manner otherwise.
Mind if I ask which MUD this is?

> Very interesting, thanks for the response, KaVir. I'm glad you
> clarified what you meant by classes - I would have thought of
> them in the typical profession-esque sort of manner otherwise.

The first mud I ran was a Diku/Merc derivative, and one of the first things I did was strip out the classes, because I never really liked arbitrary restrictions. A short time later I decided to add vampirism as a supernatural condition, and then I started giving it special trainable abilities - at this point there was no reason not to become a vampire. So to provide a little variety I decided to add werewolves, and before I knew it I'd accidently made the mud class-based again.

But the concept worked pretty well, and the classes felt more logical to me than the typical profession-style classes, because the class abilities are very much tied to their supernatural nature - so when I created my current mud I designed it around the same thematic concept. You might ask why a warrior can't learn to pick pockets or why a thief can't learn a few spells, but nobody asks why a titan can't have a lashing tail, or why a dragon can't draw strength from their blood in the same way as a vampire. Well I do sometimes get people asking why vampires can transform into wolves, but I just tell tell them to read "Dracula".

The point is that even if you remove professions, you may find that you've still got classes - for example, perhaps your races will also double up as classes, particularly if there are special racial abilities. But I don't think this is a bad thing, as long as the ability restrictions make sense.

> Mind if I ask which MUD this is?

It's God Wars II.

Very interesting, thanks for the comments. I've done
something similar when working on another game in the past -
created a couple of opposing ... well, classes don't quite
fit, maybe "origins" ... for characters and found it worked
pretty well.

I think there's an underlying point to your approach that I
applaud, and it's one I've been intending with this very
system I've been discussing here. That is, the ability to
customize various layers of your character to make that
character more distinct.

If there's anything I've learned over the years, it's that
everyone wants to feel unique. Still, there's a powerful
draw to the familiar and to being understood, too. This
manifests in ways such as a character wanting to be known as
a healer so others come to them for healing, and so on. I do
have some concern that it may be difficult to balance
immersion (i.e. not blatantly talking about one's abilities
in an out of character fashion) and this desire to be
understood in the absence of a class system.

TrevorRage, having read through this thread I am still rather unclear as to the distinction between what you're now calling "class abilities" and what you're now calling "skills". I understand some of the mechanical differences - class abilities are acquired by spending points that you acquire by gaining XP, and skills are improved by practising them, for example - but there are a few I'm less clear about; and, more importantly, I have no understanding at all as to what goal you are trying to achieve by separating skills and abilities in this way. Why not have a single system whereby anything you might reasonably want to do is handled via the same learning mechanic? Why should lock-picking (for example) be a skill rather than a class ability? Why should turning undead not be a skill?

As far as a "classless" system is concerned (which is more or less what you're proposing here), the problem that such systems usually fall foul of is that they make the "cookie cutter" phenomenon worse rather than better. You'd think they wouldn't - if there are lots of choices, you'd expect there to be a wider range of characters; but what actually tends to happen is that there will be just one combination of abilities/skills which, for practical purposes, is more useful or more powerful than any other combination. It will take players a little while to figure out what that combination is, but, once they have, every character in the game will end up using that identical combination.

A class-based system gets around this to an extent by simply disallowing some of what would otherwise be the most powerful combinations; e.g. you can't have both awesome weapon skills and awesome offensive magic - you have to choose whether to be a warrior or a mage, and each only gets one of those things. But in a free-form system where you can get both awesome weapon skills and awesome spells, people will - and why would you not want either?

Obviously, using some sort of tree structure for abilities or skills (you need to learn certain skills as a pre-requisite for others) can help with this - it makes it impossible for a player to become as powerful as possible at everything - but the more you do that, the more you're drifting back into a class-based system again.

Trees can also be irritating for players, because they feel that practice points spent on lower-tier skills are somehow "wasted" once they have achieved the higher-level skills that replace them. (Even non-tiered systems suffer from this. I recall one Dikurivative I used to play a lot which had 7 or 8 different spells which all simply caused different amounts of combat damage. The more dangerous ones couldn't be used at low level, but once you learned a higher-level one, any points you had earlier spent learning a less powerful one were effectively wasted from that moment on). Rather than having "Pick Locks I" and "Pick Locks II" I would be inclined to have a single "pick locks" skill with an associated proficiency number; mechanically it's the same, but it feels more satisfying, somehow. :-)

Another point which KaVir brings up is worth repeating: when a player first starts on the MUD it will be difficult for him to know which skills are useful and which aren't. His first character will therefore almost certainly make very poor progression choices. KaVir's system interestingly allows you to retroactively switch abilities around, so that if you acquire a particular ability and then realise it isn't as useful as it sounded, you can swap it out for a different skill without experiencing any penalties. If you don't do this then players will end up feeling like they have to train up and throw away 20 or more characters until they get the "right" conmbination, which will annoy them; but, thematically, interchangeable skills can cause problems (and, again, you risk the cookie-cutter effect).

(Comment added by shasarak on Fri Apr 30 9:50:03 2010)

Er... for "class abilities" read "class features". Sorry.