The Theory Of
Here you'll find discussion of all manner of topics relating to the theory of multiplayer games. As I see it, anyway. A note to commentors: if you stray off-topic or if your reply contains ad hominem attacks, your comment will be deleted.

Synopsis: Eliminate classes, and make the success of actions dependent on player skill, character skill and various ambient conditions.  The influence of the ambient conditions tends to channel characters along class lines without the use of a straightjacket.  Damage generation is removed from magic, turning magic into a means of altering the ambient conditions that influence all actions.

Daedren's recent article "My Kingdom for Different Archetypes" got me thinking about how I'd like to see the general notion of classes tackled.  I started to reply to his article, then decided that I wanted to go on a bit.  Ergo, article-o.  Most of what you'll read has been suggested by many people through the years.  This just happens to be my twist on the overall package.

There are no formal classes.  Players can use their characters to do anything that the game has implemented.  However, you'll find that certain combinations of activities simply cannot exist for what I hope will seem thoroughly practical reasons.

Character success in any action is a consequence of player skill, ambient conditions and character skill (the PAC).  A weak character cannot do strong things.  A player who cannot solve puzzles handicaps his character's success in puzzle-related actions.  The presence of a wall means that a character must walk around.

I'm not overly-concerned with the relative impact of player skill, character skill and ambient conditions on the outcome of an attempted action.  Their balance is critical to the resulting system, but for now just keep in mind that all three can play a role.  I particularly want to stress the influence of ambient conditions.

Characters use physical weapons when they want to do harm.  From daggers to longbows to clubs, the PAC will influence the outcome of whatever aggressive action the player is attempting.  A crosswind or even nearby combat may alter a bowshot.  Uneven terrain may unbalance a swordsman's stroke.

Characters can attempt all sorts of activities that traditionally involve a specific class.  Stealth is the quintessential example.  If a character wants to sneak, it sneaks.  Its success, as always, is dependent on the PAC.  It is the combination of those factors that causes players to decide how much effort they want to put into making their character able to move in a stealthy fashion.  Don't wear noisy armor.  Don't carry a lit torch at night.  Don't wear bright red clothes in the middle of a crowd of blue.

Climbing is another example of a standard activity.  There need be no "climber" class.  Simply establish that the PAC influences the attempts at climbing, and let players decide how important climbing is to them so that they can configure their character accordingly.

When a character is not well-configured for a given activity, it may be a simple task to reconfigure.  Climbing while carrying a heavy pack may be completely impractical.  But leaving the pack behind may be acceptable.  This is part of the value of having ambient conditions play a role.

This brings us to magic.  I completely divorce magic from damage.  As I stated, weapons are for damage.  Magic is for fooling with ambient conditions.  Magic is something that anyone can do, subject to the usual limits of the PAC.

If a pack is too heavy for a climber, the climber can leave the pack behind or have someone who can use magic make it lighter.  In combat, a mage can make the ground slippery or create magical barriers.  A mage might even be able to alter a character's skills in the tradition of buffs and so forth.

We could argue that many things that a mage can do could easily result in injury or death to an enemy.  However, because I want people to stick to traditional medieval weapons to do damage, magic is artificially unable to do direct damage.  A mage might be able to levitate an object or heat it up, but the mage cannot do the same to a beating heart to directly kill someone.  It negates the role of conventional weapons in the world.

Remember that the effectiveness of magic is influenced by ambient conditions.  As a result, magic may be more or less powerful depending on circumstances.  Perhaps there are lines of force in the world.  Perhaps pools of magic.  Perhaps temperature influences all magic.  Classically, perhaps the presence of certain substances (e.g. metal) interferes with magic.  Perhaps even the time of day can influence certain magical activities.  Anything could, really.  Influences might vary between characters.

So magic is about influencing ambient conditions, and ambient conditions influence magic.  That means that one mage can magically affect the conditions that impact another mage's magic.  This can lead to magical combat where two or more mages are struggling to control some kind of ambient condition.  One group wants an area hot while another group wants it cold.  They can duke it out magically.

But one character in the struggle might decide to pick up a club and go beat some heads in on the other side.  Characters are referred to as mages when they spend most of their time doing magic.  But they're perfectly capable of climbing, sneaking and swinging a sword.  Perhaps not as capably as other players and characters per the PAC, but they can do the basics.

Naturally, any character can affect the ambient conditions that influence magic.  If metal interferes with magic, a heavily-armored warrior who runs near a mage might mess up the spell being cast - or that is being maintained.  That might produce comical results as the unthinking warrior in the group walks near the mage who is actively lightening the group's climbing rogue.  The magic is interfered with and the rogue falls.  The warrior's act was completely accidental.  Probably.

I like the idea of this system because it permits players to play around with the systems, to experiment and explore in order to create a variety of effects.  It also returns damage to the hands of those wielding physical weapons, causing battles to return to the employment of relatively standard tactics.  Magic will have a definite impact, but not in the sense that it does in current MMOs.

One last tidbit that I'd throw in is that magic's ability to influence ambient conditions should be applied universally (and modestly).  That is, if the ground is slippery, it is slippery for everyone.  If a magical barrier is placed to block attacking enemies, that magical barrier will also block friendly characters.  By making magic into something that alters conditions, we end up with an essentially medieval environment - with modest variations.

Synopsis: Instead of placing a grind in between the player and every little thing that can be experienced in an MMO, a vast array of activities should be immediately available.  Beyond that, there should be a large set of exceptional rewards that players can pursue through achievement grinds of one form or another.

In MMOs, content gating is the practice of making new content accessible to players once they have completed certain tasks.  Reach level five and your character can survive in a new area of the world.  Gain appropriate faction with a certain group and your character can use the services of that group.  Complete a quest and your character can get the next step in the quest chain.

Content gating is a reasonable practice, but it has been applied far too extensively to MMOs.  There are certain basic activities that a character should be able to engage in without having to open a content gate, especially by achievement.  Perhaps foremost among these is the ability to travel the world.

There is a long tradition in gaming that a player completes levels in order.  That tradition is as old as computer gaming, stretching back to the days of Pac Man and Missile Command.  It has continued into MMOs and it is ill-used there.  Travel in a virtual setting should be accepted as a given.  A day one character should be able to be moved about the world without concern over whether it has the proper achievements.

That doesn't mean that a day one character should be able to walk up to a dragon and kill it.  It also doesn't mean that the character should be able to walk right up to the king's palace and into his private chambers to search for the crown jewels.  It does mean that all the normal conventions of travel should be in place.  A character should be able to go over and see the dragon from a distance.  A character should be able to walk over to the king's palace.  If the character approaches the dragon, it will get eaten.  If it approaches the king's palace, it will be denied entrance by guards.  That's when players have to begin to pursue achievements.  If they want to enter the king's palace, they're going to have to develop their faction with somebody so that they can at least get in the front gates.  It would certainly take a significant achievement to meet the king.

But note that this is a recipe where a player is able to do many things in the game without first accomplishing anything.  It is only the more extraordinary or unusual activities that require achievements.  Said another way, only the exceptional reward should require exceptional effort.

Riding a horse or walking through a certain forest is not an exceptional reward.  Entering the king's palace grounds is.  Being able to buy goods is not an exceptional reward.  Looking through a merchant's private stock is.  Being able to use a forge or a craftsman's table is not an exceptional reward.  Learning a guild's most-prized formula is.  The mundane requires the mundane, while the exceptional requires the exceptional.  It's important for MMO developers to know which is which.

Tackling this sort of thing would mean that a game's entertainment cannot be derived from making players work for the trivial.  It would mean that a publisher would have to include a broad swath of content that players would immediately have access to.  On day one, a player can take their character with their starting funds, buy an old horse and start riding off into the countryside without worrying about whether or not he had killed 10 rats to make the town guards happy enough to let him out the front gates.

Realize that this would mean the end of levels as we have them today.  Being able to walk through any part of the world is a mundane activity.  So it's no longer necessary to kill monsters for a week before entering a certain part of the game world.  If you want to go there, you go there.  It might be dangerous, but it would be like being a level 40 character facing level 30 to 50 monsters everywhere you go.  Sometimes you run, sometimes you don't.  Take some friends with you and you don't run very often.

Achievements remain in the game, of course.  All the usual things that you do today in a game can still be there, but they are reserved for more exceptional situations with exceptional rewards.  Just pick anything that your character would do and improve it a bit.  That's an exceptional reward.

Perhaps you jump through hoops to be able to commission a sword from a famed NPC swordsmith.  The sword is good, but the achievements are things that only a real sword enthusiast would bother doing.  You can get a perfectly good sword without doing all that stuff, but the swordsmith's weapon will give your character extra speed and damage.

That same technique can be applied to clothes, horses, food, magic, etc.  Normal gear runs around 50-80% effectiveness, but can go as high as 100%.  The exceptional stuff has an extra kick to it, moving up to 110% or so.  Plus, there would be visible elements to it that would demonstrate that the owner had gone the extra mile.  The staff is intricately carved.  The sword has a jeweled pommel.  The horse has a longer mane, etc.  To the discriminating eye, much can be discovered.

There's also the exceptional rewards of things that appeal to aficionados of a certain type of experience.  Hunting on a lord's private reserve, where there is known to be an animal that is particularly difficult to track.  A tracker's delight.  For trackers that don't care for the whole achievement thing, they just stick with tracking the animals that are running wild.  For those who like to have something to work for, they can jump through the hoops that let them hunt on the lord's private reserve.

There are the exceptional rewards of group challenges.  There might be a monster lair that has a bag of valuables in among their prized possessions.  No single character can enter the lair and grab the valuables (no, not even the 80 million rogues running around trying to sneak up on everything of value).  So it takes a group effort, and it won't be easy even then.  Remember that all of you are level 40 and all the monsters are more or less at your level.  You'll have to do some serious thinking and/or fighting to get in and out.

This pattern continues, and I don't need to keep going with examples.  Instead of using the content gating technique everywhere in an MMO, it should be used selectively, to produce challenges for those who are interested in certain rewards.  Those rewards cannot be overpowering relative to the remainder of the game, else every player will be required to obtain them.  When that happens, they become mundane rewards, and content gating returns to the mainstream experience of the game.  So the rewards are kept only slightly better than mundane, the challenges are made entertaining for those pursuing the rewards, and the rewards themselves are more of a badge of honor than a means of leaving the crowd behind.