112 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
112 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
chapter 5 "Guilds, Classes, and Clans"
|
|
|
|
Section I: Classes
|
|
------------------
|
|
|
|
I suspect you are already quite familiar with
|
|
the concept of classes. Some people even have very
|
|
strong feelings about classes, specifically, they
|
|
hate them.
|
|
|
|
Dead Souls 1 came with a class system, and
|
|
I decided to keep it because it sort of worked, and
|
|
many people are familiar with classes and want to
|
|
have them on their mud.
|
|
|
|
However, you don't have to use them.
|
|
|
|
That's right. Using classes is not required. You
|
|
can very easily make your Dead Souls mud completely
|
|
devoid of classes, if that's what you want.
|
|
|
|
The reason for this is that in Dead Souls, the only
|
|
thing a class does is confer on a player a class title,
|
|
like "Fighter", and load her up with skill settings appropriate
|
|
to that class. That's it. Classes do nothing more.
|
|
|
|
If you want player X to have all the skills of a
|
|
fighter and all the skills of a mage, just make it so.
|
|
They don't need to have class to have skills. Add
|
|
"kite flying" while you're at it. It doesn't matter.
|
|
Dead Souls operates on a skill system. The class system
|
|
is incidental to it and can be dispensed with entirely.
|
|
|
|
On the other hand, for those folks who appreciate
|
|
the role play and tactical elements involved in using
|
|
classes, Dead Souls provides you the ability to use
|
|
the existing stock classes, and permits you to create
|
|
your own. The files in /secure/cfg/classes describe them.
|
|
See http://dead-souls.net/ds-creator-faq.html#2.46
|
|
for the exact syntax of these files.
|
|
|
|
You'll notice that there is a field for "how important"
|
|
a skill is. What this modifier does is determine how
|
|
quickly your player's skill levels rise when her player
|
|
level rises. A fighter's magical ability does not increase
|
|
much when she is promoted a player level, but a mage's
|
|
magical ability certainly does.
|
|
|
|
For those who find classes distasteful, this kind
|
|
of "skill hobbling" is just the reason they hate classes:
|
|
they feel they are too restrictive. If you are such
|
|
an admin, just dont use classes, and whenever you award
|
|
a skill to a player, set the "how important" number
|
|
(techninally known as the "skill class" but that's a very
|
|
confusing term) to the same for everyone.
|
|
|
|
Incidentally, you don't *need* player levels either.
|
|
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to imagine
|
|
a scheme where players do not have advancement levels.
|
|
|
|
DS1 allowed players to join more than one class.
|
|
Unfortunately, the system was buggy enough and stripped
|
|
of classes so that it was both meaningless and a bit
|
|
of a problem. Multi-classing is by default not permitted
|
|
on DS2, but it's easy enough to implement on your own.
|
|
Review the header data in the class files to see the
|
|
syntax.
|
|
|
|
However, since multiclassing isn't something I
|
|
am interested in working on right now, I will not be
|
|
assisting anyone in getting that to work.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Section II: Guilds
|
|
------------------
|
|
|
|
The concept of "guilds" carries some baggage for me. I
|
|
learned about mudding by playing on Darker Realms, an LP
|
|
mud where a "guild" was effectively a class. There was
|
|
the mage's guild, the barbarian guild, etc. There were
|
|
also guilds that blurred the distinction between class
|
|
and race, like shapeshifters, cyborg, and dragon.
|
|
|
|
When I ran into the Dead Souls 1 conception of guilds,
|
|
then, I was pretty confused. In DS1, a guild was
|
|
kind of a player-run club. There was a guild object
|
|
that made some sort of determination about who
|
|
was in or out, who was the boss, etc. My presumption is
|
|
that in later iterations of Nightmare V, these guilds
|
|
were fleshed out and worked properly. I presume this
|
|
because in DS1 they didn't, and they seemed to make some
|
|
assumptions about the lib that were not correct.
|
|
|
|
I decided to change this for DS2, and the way it now
|
|
works is that guilds are neither classes nor player-run
|
|
clubs. The plan is to have guilds be not-necessarily-class-
|
|
based affiliations a player can have with balanced
|
|
advantages and disadvantages. As of DS2.0 there is no
|
|
working sample of this, but that's the plan for post
|
|
2.1 development.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Section III: Clans
|
|
------------------
|
|
|
|
Clans serve the purpose that DS1 guilds did. They are
|
|
player-run affiliations, managed by clan objects that
|
|
confer identity and status. As of DS2.0 there is no working
|
|
sample of this, but that's the plan for post 2.1 development.
|
|
|
|
|