[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels

[John Buehler]

Jeff Freeman writes:
> Ben Hawes <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
>> Craig Huber wrote:

>>> My question is, why does the vast majority keep circling back to
>>> the class/level/hp paradigm in spite of the aforementioned
>>> obstacles?

>> In general, I really think the old level-up, rigid-class RPG has
>> had it's day.

> I think it's not even close to being done, and possibly here to
> stay.  Players migrate to it, even when given a pure free-form
> skill system.  They make "fighters", "mages", "clerics" and
> "thieves" out of whatver system you give them.  Regardless of the
> genre.

> You try to give them more and different... and they work-around
> your "obnoxious designs" to get back to what they really want:
> classes.

I think that people just want a character social role that matches
the way they want to interact with other players.  The formulations
of fighter, cleric, etc. are archetypes that people can understand
and play.  Soldiers, doctors, scientists and the like exist in our
society for definite reasons.  In a game where damage is dealt and
damage is healed would produce soldiers and medics.  Those are
survival skills that people will naturally polarize on.

I think that people will tend to go with fighter, mage, cleric and
thief (don't forget ranger) because they are the distillation of
people's personalities in a world that has the functionality of
damage dealing, damage healing, magical damage and property.

Change the functionality of the characters and you will end up with
different classes.  I wonder what Achaea's various systems have
produced in terms of recognizeable archetypes in their characters.
Surely there are politicians of various forms.  Aggressive
politicians (soldiers) and supportive politicians (medics) - and so
on, based on the functionality of the characters.

In short, the classes that we see are the buckets that people will
naturally tend to fall into when the character abilities are based
on hack 'n slash level grinds.

As an aside, I suspect that the thief class is somewhat annoying to
a sizeable portion of the player base.  That is, it is not done
well.  That's because the thief class never quite matches a social
role that players have in mind.  I think they're after something a
bit nastier and sneakier than the game designers will give them.

JB
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