No one is born a paladin

I was just trying to come up with a nice title... Classes or skills? I go with skills. Anyway, while playing D&D, all my paladins were dead before level 5... Go figure...

Well, I said I was going with skills but in the end, it could really be a class system. Classes are just a skin on top of a skills system. It's up to you to decide how tied down the skills will be. It's not my intention to debate about classes and skills here, instead I'll explain how my system will be (nice links about this 1 and 2).

Each skill is part of a family (ex.: melee attack, range attack, magic, evasion, ...). A skill can be the parent of other skills (you have to take skill #1 if you want skill #2) or a skill can exist on its own without any parent. Here, if I wanted to have classes, I could just add a skill named Paladin that is the only way to access some paladin specific skills.

I have only 1 table in my database for all skills. It will be easier to deal with it this way. I have generic columns called value1, value2, ... that will stored the data needed for each skill.

So, what kind of skill will you have? For now, I don't know. I'll start with few and put more later. However, I pretty much have my mind set on to how they will work. I'm not really a big fan of "get new powers to kill more powerful monsters so in the end you're not really more powerful than before" scheme. And since I'd like to have PvP (my focus will be first on PvP, it will be easier to code, maybe not to balance but easier to code), I'm not really a fan of "I can beat you because I have [insert high level power here] macroed on my keyboard". I want to balance skills and not balance classes (fixed set of skills).

So I'd like to go a bit in the same direction as Eve Online (well, based on what I've been reading about since I barely played it). The focus will be to offer diversity to older players instead of giving them more raw power. When a new skill will be added to the game, I want it to be offered to old players AND new players (unless this skill is the child of another one).

So if we talk about combat, skills will look a bit like what we see in Urban Dead. Chance to hit will be a fixed % for each skill and damage will also be fixed. Attack skills will be balanced on 4 stats: chance to hit, range, damage and delay (cool down). Some more stats could be added later (something like side-effects) but I'll start with this. Here's what it could look like:

Basic melee attack
% to hit: 50
Damage: 3
Range: 1
Delay: 2 seconds

Basic range attack
% to hit: 50
Damage: 1
Range: 3
Delay: 2 seconds

Greater attack
% to hit: 30
Damage: 5
Range: 1
Delay: 2 seconds

Ultimate attack
% to hit: 40
Damage: 10
Range: 1
Delay: 10 seconds

Those are just quick-made skills just to show how it would work. As you can see, the skill you would use would depend on the situation. You couldn't really always use the same skill and hope to be equally successful all the time.

Of course, this bring up the question "If I'm dealing always the same damage, will you have powerful magic swords?". Well, I'm not there yet but the answer could be "Maybe, but never to unbalance this". Anyway, this is not part of my development focus right now. I do have some ideas but this will be part of another post.

So far, the basic mechanic of skills is done and I'm beginning work on combat (I needed the skills system first). The system to "buy" those skills is not yet implemented and is currently not important. For now, all I had to do was to make me 2 commands: /addskill and /removeskill