The latest Dragon Empires Newsletter just hit my in-box, and there’s been a big change to the game. They’ve opted to implement a class system! This is a real shame, in my opinion. I love the freedom that skill bases character systems give.
They do have their reasons, though:
Firstly, in considering a classless system we decided it would be too easy with our skills system (a total of 30 skills split between primary and secondary categories) to have players produce ineffective ‘gimped’ characters. Looking at the problem we saw we could stop that by heavily limiting player choice or through slowing progression so most character choices were made late when the player was more experienced. Neither of those options particularly appealed to us as they clearly have drawbacks.
The second problem was we felt players would tend towards a best-fit skills template, so called ‘min-maxing’ that would see maybe 3 or 4 different types of characters dominate with many skills and character templates left ignored. The only way of avoiding this would be through the finest balancing of skills to ensure all skills were totally equal and as we know this is almost impossible!
So instead we have devised a system whereby your character chooses a class which provides you with a selection of skills you can chose to level to varying degrees. Which skills (of three) you chose as a primary (you get the others as back-ups as your character develops) and to what rank you take each of the secondary skills is up to you, providing you with your own unique character while still having a character of a certain style.
Follow the more link for the full (tentative) list of classes Continue reading “Dragon Empires”