No class, skilless games

Catching up on some blog reading led me to Tobold, who talks at length about games with a class-based character package versus games with a skill-based character package.  This debate has raged literally since the dawn of the modern MMO era.  Seriously.  This is nothing that wasn’t seen on old Lum’s news site of snark, that wasn’t discussed at length by Raph and co. , that wasn’t bandied about message boards.  But it’s older than that: for as long as the concept of character packages in games has existed; the concept of how one defines the options of that package, how they are limited, and how they do/don’t develop over time has been a subject of discussion and iteration in games for as long as they’ve existed.

In many ways, every game is an exploration of the interaction of character package, or player options, with environmental hazards.

The discussion about skill-based versus class-based systems in games obscures a lot of the more interesting questions which arise when you simplify and broaden the discussion.  Look, a character class is a description of a subset of the universe of possible skills a character might have.  In a game with a skill-based system, such as Oblivion, you simply have one class which can choose between all skills.  They’re really two sides of the same coin, or opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Consider this point from Tobold:

In principle you could imagine any game with either a class or a skill system. In practice it quickly becomes evident that open virtual worlds with no goal are more suited to skill systems, while linear games with an end-game are more suited to a class system.

Really?  Let me pick out the simplest counter-example: Magic the Gathering.  Your deck constitutes your player package and every card a skill.  One can easily imagine a variation on magic where every deck is pre-defined and player may only choose from one of those decks: a class based MtG.  The result in a community of interacting gamers is a hybrid; players experiment and theorise, discuss and test, developing core deck ideas which build upon certain card synergies.  These form basic decks, which are then differentiated by individual players to suit taste and card availability.  But plain MtG is a skill-based system wherein a myriad of different skills are “very roughly” balanced against one another.  Yes, I’m aware of glaring imbalances between certain cards based on rarity, etc, particularly in the older editions.  The point still stands.

To pick out an example closer to home, I’ll point at Guild Wars.  Every character in the game had the option of choosing any skill whatever.  Their primary class merely supplied a special attribute and armor choices.  While those certainly had an impact on efficacy, the game still amounted to a wholly skill-based system.  Balance was achievable.

Tobold seems to make a common mistake of thinking that a game system can be imported into any game context: it cannot.  In a good game, every system coheres with every part of the game.  To affect change in one system ripples through the entire game, which was built and balanced around certain systems operating in certain ways.  That, in fact, is one of the issues I have with WoW in WotLK: they’re tinkering with too many systems without really considering the broader implications of their actions.  They seem to have no conception of anything beyond the immediate impact of their choices.  All the recent class revisions have, in a way, eaten out the core of the game: they missed the point of what much of the rest of the game was built around, hollowing out many of the interesting bits.

Finally, I need to take issue with the banality of Tobold’s parting comments:

Both classes and skill point systems are just crutches that enable the game to give rewards to players for not much, creating a permanent illusion of progress. Obviously that is more popular than reaching the limits of your abilities.

No.  They are a game design tool.  They can do produce an illusion of progress, yes, but they are also interesting tools for developing character packages.  Many existing tropes of progression, such as added spell ranks, were solutions to other game features.  For instance, in the original D&D, clerics had a progression of “cure x wounds” spells, much like spell ranks in WoW.  This may be called creating an illusion of progress, I suppose, but actually was added to deal other bits of the game’s workings.  Character health increased over time, as did incoming damage.  But if healing options did not improve, healing powers would be essentially marginalized: they had to grow with the characters.  Because they had no system in place to improve the efficacy of spells, they simply added more potent versions.

Why did health pools grow, though?  To help establish relative difficulty of monsters to players.  Certain monsters are harder than others.  As players move through the game, do they ever become “better”?  If so, how?  D&D answered that this came through climbing the ranks of monsters.  In order to do that, they implemented systems to change player’s relative monster level.  They probably could have built a system to level monsters to the player level, but that would have ultimately been the much more difficult to manage (particularly for poor DMs).

Does that system make sense in the world of MMOs?  I’m not sure.  Most MMOs of WoW’s ilk keep characters locked itno a level range that stepping outside of is pointless, so perhaps removing levels entirely would be ok.  But do you remove character growth entirely?  Do players ever change their character package?  If not, to add additional puzzles you need to expand on environmental puzzles (this was how games such as Adventures of Lolo dealt with things).

When I look at all that, I usually end up thinking the class v skill debate is hopelessly superficial.