Vic Rattlehead wrote:

See, the thing is with that much freedom, there IS no balance.

Says who?

Balance is something that the programmer creates. If you create an intelligent system to handle everything, you can easily balance a player's ability to throw balls of fire AND beat someone with a stick.

I don't see why you would think that is imbalanced. You can't do both at the same time, because when implemented in a game that is just stupid. If you were in a super awesome realtime fight where you could react as fast as your body can, sure, why not let them do both. But computer games OBVIOUSLY don't offer that, so what do you do as the programmer? Don't allow it!

So what does that leave to you balance... The power of a stick, vs the power of a fireball. We'll, throwing a fireball is kinda hard. Why wouldn't it be. It requires you to create something out of thin air with sheer force of will and the power of your mind. That sounds tuff. So unless you're throwing very weak fireballs, you're PROBABLY gunna take a few seconds to recuperate and throw another one.

Stick. Well, if it is a big stick... Big sticks hurt. Especially when swung by a big bulky fellah. Especially especially when the person on the receiving end isn't particularly muskly. Even if it isn't a huge stick, it surely doesn't feel good.

I could keep going on and on about the different ways to balance situations... But that is mostly just common sense.

Freedom is actually pretty easy to balance. You just have to not be a tool.

Garthor wrote:

Not being able to perform two actions at the same time does not mean that any combination of potential actions is balanced with every other combination.

That wasn't my point. I'm just saying that every possible imbalance has a way to be made balanced. Obviously with no restrictions on what skills you can get, this requires much more attention to the different possibilities, but it is still not impossible.

Classes exist because they are magnitudes (yes, magnitudes) easier to balance than a free-form skill system. Check out any of the popular MMORPGs that use classes, and then look at how hard of a time they have balancing things with an entire team of people dedicated to that sole task alone (As is the case with World of Warcraft).

The more variables you can play with, the harder a game is to balance, exponentially so. Freedom of choice does not equal balance. Classes serve the same function as invisible walls do in games - They prevent people from climbing outside of your sandbox, so that you can reliably tune things without having to account for people going under the world, or mages with sneak skills versus warriors with flying versus 2000000 other combinations of things.

And the thing is, people will make classes anyway. They'll dub a certain combination of skills something that they think sounds like what they do, and just mention that instead. And now you've surrendered control of what classes the game has to players, meaning minute changes in distantly related skills might have colossal impact on a range of classes, without you ever realizing it unless you keep perfectly in tune with what builds everyone uses and why. Which you can't.

As to the idea of skill decay, dear god no. Skill decay is one of the best ways to discourage players. You never, ever, ever want to tie negative events to things such as low playtime. Which is what skill decay does. In general, you want to keep negative events completely gone or limited to situations with risk that the player willingly participates in. Such as a Maze of Death that might yield great rewards, but where your character loses something they can regain over time (gold, experience f.ex, or temporary stat loss). If I don't want to risk those annoying things, I just won't enter the Maze of Death.

Jmurph wrote:

Classes are also a way for players to have clearly defined roles (and, hopefully, usefulness) within the context of the game. As Alathon points out, classes will develop by skill combos anyway. Whether this is desirable or not is an open question. Even within classes, sub-classes will develop based on builds if there are options.

Balancing classes is easier because of limits that are usually associated with item usage, etc. You can say that healers can't use swords, for example, but how do you do that with a healing skill and a sword skill? Healing doesn't work when you have a sword equipped? Easy to circumvent.

I've always felt classes to be rather needlessly restrictive. In Lord of the Rings, Aragorn was not a specialized healer but he had such great skill with healing that he was more effective than the best healers in Gondor. Yet he was also a greatly skilled swordsman. All that came from both lore and experience of course, as he had had many hard journeys and had had a long life already up to that point. In some games this kind of thing might be handled by just creating a ranger class, but that too is an artificial barrier.

I think it makes sense that skills could have some degree of rustiness, where perhaps you would not lose them over time but their effectiveness would wane. In this way a person who had once acquired vast skill as a healer could, for instance, do simple first aid easily but might have a low success rate at or take longer to do something like setting a broken bone or removing an embedded arrowhead.

Lummox JR

Garthor wrote:

Citing literature as a reason classes are "needlessly restrictive" is absolutely silly. Just because it works in a book doesn't mean it works in a game.

Agreed to a point, but the best games tell stories. Gaming is a form of storytelling in its own right, particularly in a well-executed RPG.

As I've already said, classes provide a means for the developer to actually give a game some semblance of balance. If players can pick and choose skills, they will min-max them as best as they can, creating "classes" anyway which are simply one more step removed from the developer's control. Yes, you CAN balance these "classes", but any small change to anything will have unintended consequences.

On top of that, classes promote diversity. In a skill-based system, one or two builds will become the most common because they are obviously the most effective (see: Ultima Online). Any attempts to make other skills more effective will result in them being rolled into whatever the crowd favorite is. With classes you can balance them properly and provide actual diversity, rather than hypothetical "oh nobody's going to choose the same combination" wishful-thinking diversity.

It's been my experience that classes don't balance well or promote diversity. Usually some classes outpace others in ability and that forces people to eschew those that are more limited. Of course I concede the point that without them you could end up with a vague blob of similar skills on everyone, but that does seem to be what happens anyway. Magic-oriented characters need to buff up on fighting skills to survive; fighters need to get basic healing spells or companions who have them. The class system is very much a JRPG relic and really only works well, I think, in party games where you can have companions balance out each other's flaws, or standalones like Nethack where playing the class is more of a personal challenge.

Lummox JR