Musings on class

Originally written on Dec 16, 2016. Edited on Dec 18, 2022. Original blog available at: https://theexcelrpg.wordpress.com/

Class. Class is a fairly big deal. The 2013 Great British Class Survey said there were 7 new classes: Elite, Established Middle Class, Technical Middle Class, New Affluent Workers, Traditional Working Class, Mages and Archers.

The 2013 Great British Class Survey discusses three types of capital: social, economic and cultural. The 7 different classes they defined have differing amounts of each type of capital, and this determines which class they fall under.

Thankfully, the classes we’ll be looking at are again going to be very similar to the classic tropes – warrior, mage, rogue. However to keep it a bit more interesting I’ll blend them together, so you could be a pure warrior, pure mage, or some armour wearing sword in one hand fireball in the other killing machine. This leaves us with 6 classes. The blended classes can access elements of both parent classes, but they don’t have full access to the skills. Admittedly, adding all of these classes definitely complicates things, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I might also add a class with no real speciality, but mild proficiency in everything. This would mainly be to mix things up a little. Again, I’m not sure of the setting so I’ll have generic names, which I can then replace once everything is sorted. Generally classes have a favoured attribute as well, and this is generally linked to the relevant skillset – intelligence for magic users for example.

I mean you can see the rather ugly table, which will really help to summarise the pros and cons of each class. I’m still unsure whether it’s worth assigning different levelling up methods to each class – those of you who played KOTOR may recall that eventually your Jedi had the option of being one of three classes – Guardians, Consulars and Sentinels. Guardians would have the option of selecting feats every single level up, Consulars could choose new powers every level up, and Sentinels had access to more skills. It would be possible to have a system like this in place, but I’m not yet sure how it would work.

Thinking about KOTOR inspired me to read about the mechanics of it once more, and I think I’ll use elements of KOTOR to help with levelling up, and with determining hit points and mana and things like that. I mean KOTOR is heavily based on dice rolls (hence the DC class which so many tasks have) and so it should still work well for this game.

However I feel I’ve got a general idea of how this will all come together, so let’s get onto the spreadsheet and start creating the option to choose a class.

I kept ripping off things from KOTOR’s class system, because it seems to do the job fairly well. I then got a bit bored so I moved onto looking at the game from a much more abstract way, and seeing how the final product would come together to make a finished working product. I’ll return to the class system in a lot more depth in a later post, but right now I much prefer the abstract view. So looking at the actual opening sequence, there are quite a few different options to program already. I’m beginning to realise the true nature of this project, and how much work it will take.

I’m also starting to think about how the player will interact with the game. The text based RPG elements do simplify things somewhat, however I get the impression the entire game will be based on using Macros and Message Boxes/Input Boxes. It may be a smarter idea to write all the text for the message boxes in the spreadsheet, and then use some concatenating to make the boxes work. This is the preferable alternative to manually programming hundreds, if not thousands of boxes.

I know this post hasn’t really addressed the class element of the game yet. Hopefully this will be done fairly soon, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to where to begin. My brainstormed ideas involve a fairly simple progression.

These decision trees give a rough idea of how I’ll have to link everything. Sadly, this is just a drop in the ocean in terms of the amount of functionality I’d like the game to have, so we’ll see how it all goes.

I might do some work now on the classes, but realistically I think I’ll post sometime on Sunday.

See you (not literally I’d hope) then.