A new class/skill system

[Kyrie]

I think our first step should be dropping several classes and go back to basics: 4 classes. To start.

Fighter, Mage, Thief, Ranger.

I'm sure everyone knows this, but for completeness I'll go over it anyway:
Fighter: excellent physical attack, high health, usually a "meat shield" type of character.
Mage: excellent magical attack, low health, long range attacker reliant on spells and not physical attacks.
Thief: middle of the road attack power, relies on stealth (#hide/backstab) for damage.
Ranger: middle of the road attack power, relies on distance to attack physically.

This is how players will start the game, choosing one of those classes. Their skill set will rely entirely on their class: Fighters should have 0 magic options to start, Mages should have 0 weapon options to start. Thieves could have "level 1" weapon options to start with, and "level 2" magic options. Rangers exactly the opposite: level 2 weapons and level 1 magic.
Other skills, endurance, healing, weight cap, etc, will be accessible to all classes, but to varying degrees. Fighters will have the highest endurance multi, for example. Thieves would likely have the highest dodging.

At a certain point, say RL10, your character enters vocational training: they have to complete certain objectives, perhaps, which will intentionally take a fairly extended amount of time. At the end of that time they can select a specific class to promote into, perhaps have two or three options per "general" class.
Example: a fighter completing his vocational training is given a choice and a new quest to solidify that choice. He can become a Tank Fighter, Paladin Fighter, or an Berserker Fighter. Each of these will open up a different set of skills. Tank fighter will receive a massive endurance boost, but have 0 magic options; he'll need to rely on his on health to survive and need potions or healers to heal him. Paladin fighters will have a limited range of defensive spells; they can heal and shield, but not as well as a true mage. Their attack and health are also weaker than other fighters. Berserker fighters have the strongest physical attack, but they should take an increased amount of damage from enemies. They have lower HP than tanks and also no magical ability.
That is just an example for fighters specifically, but the other three classes would be organized in a similar fashion. Once completing your finalization quest for your class, you gain access to your sub-class' specific skill, perhaps at rl20 or so.
Example:
Tank Fighter: #warcry - This skill temporarily increases the HP of the user and all nearby party members.
Paladin Fighter: #moralization - This skill full heals all party members within range.
Berserker Fighter: #aggravate - This skill temporarily increases the attack power of the user and all party members within range.
Finally, when the player hits, say, RL50-70, they can get access to their ultimate skill, a highly powerful class specific skill.

Explanation for "Skill Levels." This will group attacking/defending skills into levels. For weapons it will consist of 'weapon sets', level one slash weapons would be like hatchet, war axe, long sword. Level one offensive spells could be thorn, fireball, ice spike.
You'd break up all skills, weapons, armors, and spells into these levels and your class and subclass would determine how far into each level you can proceed. A Berserker Fighter, for example, could go all the way up to level 5 Slashing and obtain the most powerful slashing weapon. The other two fighter classes might only go up to level 4 slashing. Thieves could go to level 3 slashing, at the most, and mages would have 0 slashing ability. Perhaps every 30 remorts or so you would obtain a number of ability points (for lack of a better phrase) which you could use to advance to the next level of weapon/armor/spell.
Since your weapon selection would be more dependent on your remort level than your level level, we'd need to reconfigure the damage settings for weapons to have it increase more based on your level. An RL10 fighter would only have access to, say, level 2 slashing weapons, the most powerful of which could be the battle axe. He'd need to use that all the way to the remort level at 101.

This is a fairly general over view of my ideas for a new class and skill system taking into account a remort cap. No numbers are solid, they're just example numbers to give an example for my ideas.

Please contribute and critique.

[Particle]

I wonder if maybe we should depart from the traditional "You have fighters, rangers, mages, and thieves." approach.  It's kind of worn out as it is found in every RPG ever made.

What if we took a more realistic approach that forces players to be more creative in their approach to a given situation.  For example, I don't care if you're a leet ninja level four trillion--if you take a powerful sword hit in line with your neck, you're dead.  So what I'm getting at is perhaps we should increase the importance of tactics, weapons, spells, and armors instead of just using health as a crude duration meter.

The way attacks work and the way NPCs operate would need to be changed for this to be practical, but I do think there could be a lot of merit to such a system.

Of course, the classes would still be important.  They would determine what path a player goes on.

Warriors of course are more about heavy armor and weapons.  Thieves would be about light armor and weapons.  Rangers would be about medium armor and ranged or light weapons.  Mages would be light armor and very light weapons.  Each would of course also have their specialties such as stealing, magic, bash, etc.

To me this sounds more fun than just playing an increasing numbers game.  Because 10,000 health doesn't mean much more than 1,000 if the people you are fighting simply do 10x the damage...and that gets old.  It also prevents realistic things such as falling damage, crush damage, etc from working properly.  How could I justify percentages?  Falling 25 feet with 200 HP does 140 damage but when you're big and bad it does 2000?  That would be sorta funky.

So, I'd like to keep things in perspective.  Actually, it would be nice to get rid of numeric health altogether (at least in the overt sense).  I'm not pushing for a realism simulator, but I do think we could take some lessons from life to make situations and feelings more identifiable.

[Kyrie]

Putting a cap on HP would be a very interesting idea and keep the playing field very equal.
I could see this being implemented with skill caps, as well.
If we say the max possible skill is 1000, then the most powerful weapon with 1000 skill would do at most, say, 500 damage. If we use the Weapon/Spell level idea, level 4's most powerful weapon could do 400 damage, level 3, 300 damage, etc. This would keep players playing to get the highest level weapon, but still keep those players within a reasonable range of lower level players.
Something I've been trying to implement for rewards is stat-based rewards. Until now rewards have almost always been either EXP, Money, or Items. I think with a scaled down stat system, stat based rewards can become very desirable and important. Skills that boost stats for a period of time would also be implementable.

What encourages AFKing is repetitious gameplay. When you're doing the same thing every remort, it becomes less and less fun. If we can scale back the entire system to the point that 100 remorts becomes a big feat players will see less repetition and more live play time. I'd like to see encouragement for players who work together where leveling with a partner is easier than leveling alone.
If two players teamed up, a tank and a healer, the tank could stand in a zone and take hits while the healer could heal him and still collect enough exp from the kills to make it worthwhile for him to continue healing. He doesn't have to attack the enemy directly as he's aiding a team mate and still gaining experience.

I guess I'd like to see something similar to Team Fortress 2 where no matter what class you play you're as useful and abled as any of the classes.

You could basically remove the entire class system. When a player joins, instead of giving them classes to choose from give them the sp menu. The skills they raise will determine the class they become.
If we use the level system for skills you could start with by giving them choices to raise their level in a particular skill.
Example:
I could start out by putting 1 level point in Slashing, Piercing, and Offensive Casting. As I level up I decide that I like slashing the best and raise that to level two. Raising slashing to level two marks me as a warrior and closes off my ability to raise offensive casting to level 2. I retain my knowledge of offensive casting level 1 spells that I learned but I can't learn any new ones. Continued development of further skills to higher level continues to more specifically mark my class, perhaps with modifiers.

Low level player: Trainee
Middle leveled player who has level 2 slashing: Warrior
Middle level 2 who has level 3 slashing and a high endurance: Healthy Warrior
Middle Level 3 with 4 slash, very high endurance, high armor rating: Healthy Warrior Tank

and so on, certain levels of certain skills would add a class modifier to your class name. High endurance makes you "Healthy", high armor rating makes you "Tank", etc.

Remorting would not reset your unlocked skill level, but it would reset your skill stats. A remort 20 who has unlocked level 3 slashing would still have level 3 slashing unlocked when he remorts, but his slashing skill would reset from 1000 to 1. Skill level only determines what weapon set you can advance to and what special # commands/skills you can use.

Level 1 slashing would use the hatchet as the first weapon. Level 2 slashing could use the longsword as the first weapon, but it would only be slightly stronger than the hatchet and only need 0 Slashing, Level 2 Slashing. So a level two's weapon set is used in place of the level 1 weapon set, but is only slightly stronger. I think I explained that understandably.

[Dyre]

Yeah, I like the idea of an HP cap as well.  Lot's of great ideas popping up here.

Still, some sort of soft cap to skills would help keep that never ending feel that TRPG has.  Basically, make it harder and harder to level your skills, but you could theoretically get them up to 20k if you played long enough, of course, it might literally take 100 years of smacking at the strongest enemy with a weapon that hits every second.

Also, I think bashing should be nerfed a bit.  Especially if the system is to change.  Not only should we reduce the damage, but I think bashing should require MP (to simulate stamina, and MP would be harder to come by for a basher, since they'd have low energy), and a missed bash should still require a player to re #bash.  It would add a huge amount of skill to a very powerful attack.

Various other changes would be nice, such as actually differentiating the various weapon classes a bit more.  As it is now, bludgeoning is simply the best pvp weapon skill.  My previous suggestion would help a bit with that, but adding special abilities for the other weapons could be a way to help balance this a bit.  We could rename the bash skill something a bit more broad, such as weapon mastery (or simply mastery), and it could be all inclusive for the various weapon classes.  Your actual player class would determine the type of weapon you'd probably be using.  A thief would use mastery for backstabbing, a blunt warrior (barbarian?) would use it for bashing, a slashing warrior (knight?) could use it for something new (I like the idea of a possible crit, based on how high the skill is, but that would mean a completely different method of training for slashing), and archery could fire shots that go faster and further, maybe a special high mastery ability called #snipe that works kind of like bash, and basically fires a single arrow like the laser rifle (which would also increase the effectiveness of the weapon).  I also think that polearms should be their own weapon class, but I don't know what a special ability for those would be.

Also, a small suggestion for archery.  Headshot damage would be nice.

As for the limitations to the various classes, it would be nifty to be able to "subclass" at some point.  Maybe at RL 50?  Subclassing would allow you to use the defining skill(s) from one other class.  As a warrior, you might pick up defensive casting and energy from the healer class, or offensive casting and energy from the mage class.  A mage might choose to sub warrior, and wear the heavier armor and have higher HP, or sub healer and be able to heal and have extra MP.

Also, a special skill that becomes available to gods would be awesome.  Maybe only gods could earn the ability to transport (Yeah, I know, transporting seems almost mandatory, but the class system would already limit the ability by quite a bit, this would allow every class to earn the ability).  Other special abilities for gods could be the ability to bless (or curse?) one non-god every hour or so, and a system that would prevent the god from relogging to reuse the skill would be great.  Basically abilities that allow the uber player to help lowbies by buffing them, or moving them about.  Gods could be represented by an orb over their head that provides light (maybe even colored light, depending on whether you're merciful or wrathful?).  I really REALLY like the idea of god specific abilities  that only affect other non-gods, as well as various advantages for being merciful by helping, or wrathful by harming (which would encourage players to choose a specific route).

And finally, an ability to cast on a specific target would be wonderful.  Basically meaning you wouldn't have to actually aim at the target for certain spells, but simply type #magic "name" to cast spells on said player or bot.  Of course, range would have an impact, and you'd have to have a line of site on the named character to cast on them.  It would help with healers though.  The same ability could be coupled with the aforementioned god skills to allow gods to use those abilities on anyone currently on the server, i.e. #transport Dyre jaten, #summon Dyre (brings player to you if they agree), #bless Dyre, #curse Dyre, #vorpal Dyre, #dull Dyre, etc...

Again....  I have plenty of ideas.  Limitations are always good, and reaching god status should be the ultimate goal.  The remort level could be capped at 100, and gods could gain status by helping other players.  In fact, it would be nifty if lowbies could #worship a god (again, once a day or so, to prevent spammage).  Gods with high worship ratings could have shrines set up for them that give them certain advantages (to encourage godly behaviour).  etc...etc..etc...