Re: Classes, Race, Experience proposal

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

Peter Mardahl <peterm@soda.berkeley.edu> recently wrote:


>
>I've made this proposal before, but I've let it rest
>because there didn't seem much support for it.  But in light
>of the recent class arguments I'll fire it off again.
>***********************************************************
>
>Proposal: Establish 4 Experience divisions
>
>Priest  *  Mage  *  Fighter  *  Thief
>
>  What you do determines how you accumulate experience in a division.


    This leads me into one of the major problems I have about crossfire.
Lately, most of the discussion has been abut gameplay mechanics thigns.
Frankly, everyone here is going to have vastly different opinions about
this.  Right now I can see a discussion going on between the strong 
class-differentiation and weak-or-no class-differentiation camps.

	There's good points and bad points to either.  Getting everyone to
agree on one or the other just isn't going to happen.  There's too many 
differing opinions on how what the best, most playable, way to model our
little crossfire reality.  

	Really, what would be best to do would be to put all the game-play
mechanics aside, perhaps in their own directory, for the individual server
admins to customize as they see fit.  Generalize the rules and action
tests of teh game as much as possible in the core source, and let the 
'game-play' library decide how whether these succeed or not. Then we're
writing a metagame, and then everyone can tune the game running under the
metagame however they want.

For example, let's say a player tries to put on an object, let's say some
armour. In my example, you'd call a function to see,  first, if they are
permitted to (for whatever race/class/social-standing/legal reasons). Then
run some core-system function to put it on them (update weight, mark it
as worn, etc), and then some game-play function to do when they put it
on.

	The primary problems with this is that soo much of the gameplay-rules
are already scattered randomly about the server source, and the player and
object structs are such a mess, that this would be hard to clean up.

The cynic in me says, however, that we'll just end up with a stupid class
system, since its so much easier to code.  And then we'll have splinter
groups trying to write much saner game systems.  It'd be nicer, however,
if it was easier to keep them all together with the same core source.

I say this all because, quite frankly, I'm not in the 'classes' camp. I
only play D&D when I want to show how ridiculous that game is.  D&D is
simple to make it playable.  We DONT need to do that here, because we've
got this wonderful computerized DM to handle all the annoying little
details.


 Eric Mehlhaff, mehlhaff@crl.com