[MUD-Dev] Playing catch-up with levels

[Matt Mihaly]

John Buehler wrote:

> 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.

Well, we have a rigid class system, but the classes don't neatly
fall under the D&D-style classifications that are typical of
muds. All of them except for maybe one are designed to be able to go
head to head with each other. A mage can fight at short range just
as well as a knight can, for instance. And I have no idea where
things like our Apostate class fit in. None of our classes are
really 'support' roles either. They're all meant to be able to get
out there and mix it up.

Those classes also give no advantages or disadvantages in terms of
politics. Anyone can be a politico, as our political systems are
based entirely on convincing other people that you should lead them.

> 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.

Definitely.

> 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.

I think what most thieves want is the ability to grief others
without a
large risk to themselves.

--matt
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