A while back a friend and I played a game where you could, essentially, fight parties from early Final Fantasy games in PVP. I had forgotten about it until we talked again recently about support characters in D&D.
We were going over the familiar complaint that, in 3.5e D&D, clerics simply make better fighters than the Fighter class does. The most probable reason for beefing up the cleric was that they wanted to make it a more attractive class- everyone who has put together a D&D party knows the pressure of "ok guys, we need a cleric." No one wants to play the support character when they could be playing a primary character, but the entire party will suffer if someone isn't the support character.
A very similar thing happens in MMOs, because the MMO group is very similar to a D&D group. Someone's got to be the priest. Some people enjoy it- and actually the only character I got to 60 in WoW was a priest. It was nice to always have a spot in groups or raids, but it got pretty boring after a while to be concerned solely with the party's HP.
My solution was to suggest giving everyone multiple characters. If you've got two slots, then devoting one of them to support is no problem- and I think a lot of people would prefer to have, essentially, a character worth 1.5 and a character worth .5 than two characters worth 1.
So what would happen if you gave everyone, instead of a character, a party? Most of the mechanics would work rather similarly- the primary difference is that it needs to be easy to control multiple characters. This can be done either through good AI (probably not; as mentioned before, the best AI available tends to be sub-par and I'm a far way from being able to afford the best AI possible) or by making combat turn-based.
Turn-based combat is easy to do in single-player games, and gets more troublesome in multiplayer games. Something has to be done to keep things moving (turn time limits and a preset default move if no orders are given in the time limit seems best), and unless players move simultaneously puts a soft cap on the number of players that can be in a party.
Speaking of parties, how would you combine adventuring groups well into the traditional MMO group? If there are synergies between different character types (which is the best way to do things) it becomes hard to optimize groups out of optimized subgroups; if you only need one paladin for the group of 9 people, if each subgroup has a paladin there will be a problem.
There are two main solutions: make it so synergies like that stack (i.e. 1 paladin and 1 death knight is only slightly better than 2 paladins or 2 death knights) or make it so each person has a stable of characters. You can only take out 3 or 4 people on adventures, but you have 6 others sitting back at the tavern, so that if the raid doesn't need your paladin you swap him out for your death knight.
The stable approach seems superior, in that it allows you to switch out characters without having to start the entire group over- if you decide that your group of fire mage, ice mage, and lightning mage really does need a meat shield, you don't need to create a new group to have that and level up the two mage types that you want to keep again.
Unsurprisingly, I don't have a good name for this one either- I guess RPG MMO will suffice for now. It seems like it'll be the easiest one to get fully workable, and so I'll devote most of my time to it (despite having already started work on MGC).
2 comments:
I think I like your idea of 2 characters better than the idea of a whole party. I always wanted to play a D&D game where there are only 2 or 3 players but each has two PCs, just to see what it would be like, but that would slow down combat considerably. What if, instead, multiclassing were reworked a bit, and you had one character with two classes, and then whenever you gained a level, you got to beef up both sides of him/her?
This might also be done just by completely reworking all the standard classes, but easier to understand & maybe more fun to play, if you're imagining it as a rogue with some attack spell abilities, or a fighter with some healing, or a wizard with some skill at summoning (rogue/sorcerer, fighter/cleric, wizard/druid).
As the game designer, or the rulemaker, it might be better to set some limits about what classes can be chosen, for the sake of balance. A figher/barbarian just ends up being the guy who can hit well, all over again. Perhaps label each class type (I suppose the D&D4e "roles" might work) and disallow choosing your two classes from the same type.
I also agree it would work better with your 1.5/0.5 vs 1/1 structure. Much better to have a main function that is augmented in some way.
Or, going an entirely different way, create base classes and augmenter classes as two completely separate things. The spellcaster with some sword mastery and the swordfighter with some spells might be built very differently because each class works one way as a main class and another as a second class. Depending how you did it, the fighter sub fighter might actually be interesting to play, though not any more (or less?) effective than the fighter sub healer. Hmmm.
(Although in a way, that last paragraph is going in the direction of multiclassing in 4e, it would probably work better in this context if the second class had more focus than that).
Have you seen FFXI.
Each character levels up all jobs individually, so you'll have a level in Black mage, White Mage, Fighter, Theif, Monk, and red mage.
You can also subjob one of those capped at half your main level. So you'd go out to exp as a figher 75/white mage 37 i.e. a character with all the abilities of a fighter at max level but also able to heal as well as half full level white mage.
The problem?
Well a white mage 37 can't heal well enough to keep a lvl 75 tank alive, so you still need a specialist healer, a sub-jobbed support role (red mage or bard for instance) won't get the party as much exp as a fully levelled support job.
What's more it turns out melee jobs synergise with melee subjobs. Hate management goes better with more hate management than say healing.
What should allow character to be more adaptable actually end up being restrictive as people insist on certain combos. Back in the days I played for instance fighers always subbed Ninja. If you didn't noone would party with you.
There's deffinatly something there, but you'd have to be very careful of designing it correctly, and the MMO crowd is notoriously hard to channel through design, especially into flexablity.
Great blog by the way, I've a similar interest in this area, and no matter what game i play i always end up reading lots into the design and it's effects. From my days playing FFXI, to gothador, to M:TG.
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