I've had feedback from a couple of play testers that the distinction between Heroic and Retainer classes is confusing. This is kinda what I expected, and v0.91 will remove the distinction.
Originally I planned the Heroic/Retainer distinction as a way to achieve a couple of goals.
Firstly, I wanted to support changing out party members without supporting Wiz8 style recruitable player characters (RPCs). I didn't like the Wiz8 way, and allowing retainer characters to be replaced at a guild seemed a better way forward. In addition, it opened the possibility of training up a team to go on special missions - a team of stealth:wilderness specialists to strike out into the forest, for example.
Secondly, I was aiming for a game that displayed different snippets of information based on which Heroic character class you chose - inspired by the Blood Sword game books.
In practise it seems like the confusion for players outweighs any benefits from the first point, and developing a campaign with useful info-snippets for all the heroic classes was very tedious. To solve these problems, I'm going to just present one set of classes to choose from and make the knowledge snippets dependent on character modifiers instead of character class.
The class hierarchy will need some re-jiggering since most of the current Retainer classes are weaker versions of the Heroic ones. I plan to introduce more character class abilities and tweak experience point tables to balance this. Still, fitting in both of some combinations might be hard: Rogue/Thief, Ranger/Scout, Hero/Warrior. I'm not yet sure how I will manage the retainer class guild replacement feature, but for a first pass I might just disable it.
More on the knowledge modifiers later, when I have refined the list.
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