[crossfire] classes & guilds, was Re: class guild map (was: reorganizing the entire world)

[Mark Wedel]

  It seems to some extent (could be wrong), that some amount of the motivation 
behind this new set of guilds was to add some meaning to the classes (maybe not 
the only motivation).

  However, it has been discussed (and is even on the 2.0 todo list) that classes 
get redone so skills are important.  Various suggestions made - rather than copy 
them all, people can read them at:

http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/dev_todo:race_class_changes

  I'll note that some changes are very easy to make, and require little/no code 
changes.

  In particular, the skills do have self contained information about how much 
exp ones gets for the skill.  So it is just a matter of creating some new 
archetypes with different values (basic/expert/master skills?  But maybe a 
better name, as that suggests more how good you are in the skill, not how well 
you learn it - something like attuned/normal/repelled is almost better, but 
would be confusing with spells).  But whatever - one could easily make up 
instances of the existing skills that have a difference in the exp gain rate.

  The treasurelist for the races/classes then just get modified to give the 
appropriate skills.  Eg, the fighter gets the attuned version of the fighting 
skills, and repelled version of the magic skills).

  I'd almost think skillscrolls should get removed from the game (what skills 
you start with is what you have, but you'd just start with repelled versions, so 
would be sucky at them all).  IF skillscrolls should remain, then they would 
only give the lowest quality (repelled) versions of the skills.  And in fact, to 
  make it easy to upgrade existing servers (and try and get players to start new 
characters), all the existing skills could become the repelled version.

  There may be a few rare quests which would update a repelled skill to a normal 
skill.  IMO, there shouldn't be any way for a character to get an attuned skill 
once the game is started.

  Off the top of my head, only code changes that might be necessary:
1) Currently, races get skills, and classes get skills, and in some cases they 
overlap (the race has alchemy weapons, as does the class).  I'd think the right 
approach here is that in the end, the character gets the better of the two.  But 
  some code changes would need to be made, as right now, the character code 
checks to see if a character has a skill, and if so, doesn't give it to them as 
part of the class selection.

2) This may not be an issue, but I'd have to look closely about how reading 
something like a skill scrolls sees if you know a skill - if it does it by 
archetype name, that would need to get changed, since we'd have karate_repelled, 
karate_normal, karate_attuned, and a character that has karate_attuned doesn't 
want it replaced by karate_repelled when they read a skill scroll.

3) Some code would be needed to update skills from repelled->normal, but that 
should be pretty easy also.