[crossfire] races, classes, and play style

[Robert Brockway]

On Sat, 1 May 2010, Mark Wedel wrote:

>  I personally favor #3, #2, and #1 in that order (I like #3 the best).  My

I agree.   Classs (or races) could have any combination of the following:

* Exclusive skills
* Skills with favourable XP tables
* Skills with unfavourable XP tables
* Prohibited skills

> thought is that as a player, it gives more reason to try a few different 
> classes - if the first class I choose can do everything equally well,

I've done a lot of boardgame design and one thing I learnt a long time ago 
- a game is as much about what you can't do, as what you can.

Having skills that fall in to the above 4 categories will increase the 
playability of the game as people will have to play many different 
characters to experience all that the game has to offer.

You can also see some interesting emergent behaviour (not all of it 
desirable).  ie, players will dream up things the game designers never 
anticipated.   Problems that arise can be fixed though.

>  I think #2 is a bit too restrictive - while comment about player 
> interaction above stands, at same time, a lot of play is probably solo, 
> so not being able to do some other stuff probably gets too restrictive,

Right - being able to learn all (or almost all) skills but having some you 
are naturally better at is the best of both worlds, IMHO.   Solo play is 
still viable but the player is encouraged to try different characters with 
different specialties.

> but I'm not sure how that would really play out (presuming we still 
> allow anyone to use wands, scrolls, potions, and a suitable supply is 
> about, one could probably get around).  It would certainly be a 
> different game.

Some of these options might even work as runtime configuration options. 
This would mean that different CF servers would play very differently but 
that's ok too.

Rob

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