Shattered Kingdoms

If this were true, people would only play sorcs and necros. Not that I think grep's idea is great. It's just that the game is not even close to balanced as far as classes go, but there's a pretty good distribution anyway.

Baldric, you know full well when a vet gets angry and wants to roll something to just kill people, there's only a narrow band of race/class combinations that get selected.

Indeed. I can think of several characters that owned face on some of the best players. Yes, sorcerers and necromancers are great and all, but I have said before, they take a special type of person to play. There was one female deep-elf warlock adept from back in the day that sliced through my entire group of fist members (there were 5 of us) that were all at least Master status or above. One paladin, a scout, another warlock (WITH his fire elemental), a sorcerer and a shaman. We got take by surprise and she unloaded an entire e-drain stave on us By the time she was done, I was down a level and a half and all out loot was gone. She left the last person alive but stunned and bloodmoted (I hope I don't get in trouble for mentioning old cabal spells). In a nut shell, she handed out butts to us on a silver platter.

My point being, it doesn't take a necromancer or sorcerer to gank everyone. It takes a good player to recognize how to use the tools they have to their best capabilities. With how grep has explained his idea, I can see a bit more potential to it, and I can could see how it could possibly work. Not only is he more than accurate with how much coding it would require (you might as well just scrap the entire class system as it is), but I think this still might end up as I said before. Perhaps you would only end up with 2 or 3 different types of "class sets" that people would roll and that would be it. Clergy that owns face, arcane that owns face, and warrior that owns face. Those without that know-how to do so from the get go would get ganked repeatedly until they figured out how to roll what their enemies did. Several months in, voila! You have a cookie cutter class system. The only ones that would break the mold would be the hardcore RP players like myself.

I would end up rolling something along the lines of what my old halfling harlequin bard in Marfik was. NO PK value whatsoever. However, I RP'd the JUNK out of that game. Made Marfik HF and nearly Harlequin leader just from RPing all day, every day. Oh the stuff I came up with and all the books I wrote.

I can't say it is a horrible idea, grep. I just don't think the people of Shattered Kingdoms would be able to swallow it. I don't think they would be ready for it. I don't know if they could grasp it. Think of all the players that don't even use the forums, lol!

That's almost misleading, there's a lot of race/class/trib/cabal combos that are brutally effective in PvP. If you want to go solo, sure, there's a smaller pool of easily effective build types, but when you start to factor in groups there's use for practically any class if you know what you're doing.

Ive played a classless mud or two in my day. I think making a list you just pick and choose from isnt the right way to go. The one i played you got x number of points to put into certain hmmm "skills" like fighting, prayer, defense, magic... after so many points into one, you would get a skill, then when you reach the next set number you get the next. Some skills/spells however required you to mix and match in a sense. Like so much into magic and also into prayer to the a certain spell.

After a time the "skills" sometimes broke down like fighting into ranged/bare handed... magic into fire/ice/lighting... not exact but you get the idea. It was kind of a pain for new players to figure out what was needed for certain skills but interesting.

The other that seemed to work was havign you choose certain "packages" that would open up other packages. like the first level fighter would give basic whatnot. Worked the same with mix and matching. Like so much into thief and so much fighter might grant assassing packages with skills or other boosts.

While it sounds fun, in the end there were certain combos that would totally over the top rape others. So it was by far more geared to twinks and certain choices over others than SK can be.

I'm more interested in a level-less system rather than a class-less system.

I don't know how this thread got so off track from the original ninja ideas, but whatever, lol.

Anywho.....how does one propose a level-less system? Not to be a negative-nancy, but isn't one of the defining points of an rpg (and this is an mmorpg last I checked) is that is a level based system?

Again, I hope I don't sound like a jerk, as I do not intend to at all. I was just curious as to how that could possible work. The only fashion I could see this in is having a character frame where the skills, spells and songs would operate similar to how they do now, if not the same. Then the only other factor that would set others apart in skill would be equipment. In my opinion, the equipment system isn't exactly in greatest shape as it is. People hoard like there is no tomorrow and the super 1337 stuff is either constantly fought over and changes hands almost every day or is ridiculously difficult to get (whether it be pc or npc). Then that would take us back to the whole discrepancy that grep brought up about enchantments (see his other thread).

I'm all ears for any form of ideas on this subject, as I've been thoroughly enjoying going back and forth with you guys on this. I love having a decent debate with intelligent people over things we both enjoy.....Shattered Kingdoms. Not to mention I love getting feedback from other players and hearing about what they like or dislike about the game and how they prefer to play.

A level less system is getting a skill or spell and working it up to unlock other skills / spells with added stat allocations, or in some cases increases to stats that reflect a skill / spell being used a lot. Not exactly one of the best systems out there, as people want to see advancement in levels than in skills / spells.

I'd rather see a branching system with classes where you can enhance one aspect of a class or another as you level up. Classic exampled would be a Fighting class, one could branch off to more defensive skills becoming a Tank but loss out on damage, or do for a heavy fighting style but lacking defensive abilities, or a third option being a mix of the two for an all around average fighting class. And special skills / spells would be awarded for going heavily in one aspect.

The leveless system I imagine is one I've already played. No skill tree, nothing that complicated, but you get classes, and the strength of your character is based on the mastery of your skills, not your level Their would be no consider, you would just see a swashbuckler with two swords and have to guess whether or not he is horrible, decent or badass with them. I also don't think their was a cap on skill mastery on the game I played, don't know though, because I only played it about a month and it was a permadeath mud and pretty [REDACTED] hardcore, in a game with permadeath, and dying from dehydration, (it was a dune like post apocalytptic fantasy mud) I didn't last long with my first char, you also had to get char concepts pre approved before you could play them.

The only reason I bring that up, is because they had a totally bad [REDACTED] level-less system which is what drew me to that game.
I would have switched to that mud from sk, but I got the sk in my blood. I imagine it happened around the time I started dreaming walking around Teron with Rokki in text.

Ahhh, dreaming in text. It has been a while for me since I've had Shattered Kingdoms dreams in text. I used to quite often, though. Sometimes I would shoot awake with that "You've been KILLED!!!" message or a flurry of red, unreadable text flying by, LOL!