Re: hps of classes

["'Most Excellent' Eric Mehlhaff" <mehlhaff@crl.com>]

Simon McIntosh-Smith <Simon.N.Smith@cm.cf.ac.uk> recently wrote:


>> >A wizard is someone who is naturally more attuned to the mystic arts.

Barring the 'natural gift' theory that some game systems claim a magician
must have (either you have it or you don't -- interestingly, people born
with such a trait usually aren't impaired from being good fighters, just that
it'd be a real waste of the 'rare' talent)

>>   Why?  Because he is called a wizard?  I'm much more of the "a character
>> is what he acts like" point of view.  If you play a character in such
>> a way as to develop fighting skills:  i.e., wearing armour, quaffing
>> str,dex,con potions, having monstrous weapons, then, by God, that character
>> IS a fighter.
>
>I'd say it was the other way around. My natural abilities are intellectual;
>no matter how hard I try I will not be as good an athlete or as competitive
>in sport as some of my friends. 

So, what if you had, at your disposal, 'magic potions' that made you just as
strong or agile as those friends whom you can't be as good as?  Would you
still be incapable of being as good?

   My point here is that given the same natural abilities (usually
quantified in most games by attributes), characters should be the same.
There's no reason why one with the "warrior" label pinned on his chest
should be any better at magic or melee than one with "wizard" pinned on
his chest.
   Unless, of course, you throw in a "skills" system.  THe classed family
of FRP's ( such as D&D) use the simple approach, and assume everyone has one 
"skill" -- that being their class.  Skill systems assume people can have 
several, and have varying amounts of skills in each of them.

   Not everyone locks into a single skill or closely-knit group of skills,
but the easiesst way to get good in one is to concentrate on that one.
The jack of all trades is rarely good at everything, but neither is he
incapable of most things.

>he is more in tune with magic. The skill comes first, leading on to the
>career.
[...]
>Being a fighter MEANS
>you do spend all your time training for melee - that is your job, as that
>is where your natural skills lie - otherwise you wouldn't have been a fighter
>in the first place. 

You're using 'skill' here, where 'talent' would be a better word.  Within
the crossfire paradigm, talents would best be quantified with attributes.
Skill implies something learned, while talent does not.

>Quaffing potions is no substitute for this - why should
>you be as good a fighter as Bruce Lee just because you are as strong etc as
>him? He gained his abilities from all the training he does as a fighter;
>his ability does NOT just depend simply on his strength or reflexes.

His ability is all based on training.  Thanks for your excellent argument
FOR a skill system.

>PS Another thought - in AD&D (can you guess what RPG I play!?) PCs
>can only use weapons they are proficient in - other weapons can be used
>but at a penalty. 

AD&D keeps wanting to become a skill based system, but they don't want to
lose their simplicity. You end up with a mess.  Basically, proficiency is
a cool idea, best implemented as skill levels with individual weapons
types.

I tell you, if we had a good skill based system going, you could simplify
the heck out of it, and end up with a generic D&D-like class based system.


You people really should try something other than D&D -- GURPS, HERO,
Runequest, etc.  There's more to life than singular classes.

Oh, another interesting game to look at is nethack -- it has classes and
such, but they don't strongly dominate a characters development.  Really,
it has a lot of neat features that would be cool to bring over to
crossfire.

The other excellent source of ideas is Ultima V -- the last good Ultima.

 Eric Mehlhaff, mehlhaff@crl.com