I played a MUD years and years ago that had a system that I really loved for spells/skills and mana. It can be adapted quite easily for current day MMOGs.
At the beginning of the game you selected a race, which was extremely important. Each race had a certain amount of skill slots and spell slots. If you picked an orc, lets say, you could learn 15 skills and 18 spells (arbitrary numbers).
Every skill and spell was part of a tree. If you wanted to learn, dual wield for example, you needed to learn 1h slashing, 1h piercing, and some other skill to a certain level before you could train dual wield. Then for some higher up "skills" (the word skill is used for melee abilities) you would need Dual wield and something else. The same thing for spells.
Basically all your skills and spells were part of a tree that needed certain prereqs. If you wanted to make a heavy melee character you would pick a race that had a high skill slot number but in turn had a low spell slot number. But with that high skill slots you can use them for rogue like skills or warrior like skills or tank skills, dps skills etc. Same thing went for spells. A player could roll a "Elf" race and have a ton of spell slots to fill up and be a healer or a dps players, or a combo of both.
The nice thing with this system is that you could drop spells and learn new ones and change your character around.
This was 15 years ago but I"m sure something like this could be adapted for main stream MMOGs and allows you the flexability of creating a character you wanted. If this MUD could balance all the different archtypes.. healer, melee dps, magic dps etc of all flavors and MMOG could. Players had all sorts of builds, and they were all viable.
I liked that system in lieu of using classes.
Derail on what mana system they used.. I"ll spoiler it.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
There were four elements, obviously earth, wind, fire and air, that were associated with each spell. Each spell had a level. So for example fireball was a level 10 fire spell or you had a complete heal spell that was a level 50 air spell.
Now inherently each player had a natural spell level based on their initial stats. So lets say your elf character had high "mind" stats he would have a spell level of 19 in each element. This means he can cast any spell level 19 or below without assistance.
In order to cast spells higher than level 19 players would have to get gems. They dropped from mobs mostly but you could buy rudimentary gems from shops. The gems would be equipped in your hands in place of weapons and shields. These gems cam in all sorts of sizes and benefits. Some gems increased your earth and fire levels only, some increased just fire, or some increased all four. Some gems gave you more mana, some gave you less. You could also hold two gems at once if you were a caster which would give you more mana.
It was an interesting system that was different. I know Zehn would loathe that system, but there are ways to modify it if you don"t want to use mana.
At the beginning of the game you selected a race, which was extremely important. Each race had a certain amount of skill slots and spell slots. If you picked an orc, lets say, you could learn 15 skills and 18 spells (arbitrary numbers).
Every skill and spell was part of a tree. If you wanted to learn, dual wield for example, you needed to learn 1h slashing, 1h piercing, and some other skill to a certain level before you could train dual wield. Then for some higher up "skills" (the word skill is used for melee abilities) you would need Dual wield and something else. The same thing for spells.
Basically all your skills and spells were part of a tree that needed certain prereqs. If you wanted to make a heavy melee character you would pick a race that had a high skill slot number but in turn had a low spell slot number. But with that high skill slots you can use them for rogue like skills or warrior like skills or tank skills, dps skills etc. Same thing went for spells. A player could roll a "Elf" race and have a ton of spell slots to fill up and be a healer or a dps players, or a combo of both.
The nice thing with this system is that you could drop spells and learn new ones and change your character around.
This was 15 years ago but I"m sure something like this could be adapted for main stream MMOGs and allows you the flexability of creating a character you wanted. If this MUD could balance all the different archtypes.. healer, melee dps, magic dps etc of all flavors and MMOG could. Players had all sorts of builds, and they were all viable.
I liked that system in lieu of using classes.
Derail on what mana system they used.. I"ll spoiler it.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
There were four elements, obviously earth, wind, fire and air, that were associated with each spell. Each spell had a level. So for example fireball was a level 10 fire spell or you had a complete heal spell that was a level 50 air spell.
Now inherently each player had a natural spell level based on their initial stats. So lets say your elf character had high "mind" stats he would have a spell level of 19 in each element. This means he can cast any spell level 19 or below without assistance.
In order to cast spells higher than level 19 players would have to get gems. They dropped from mobs mostly but you could buy rudimentary gems from shops. The gems would be equipped in your hands in place of weapons and shields. These gems cam in all sorts of sizes and benefits. Some gems increased your earth and fire levels only, some increased just fire, or some increased all four. Some gems gave you more mana, some gave you less. You could also hold two gems at once if you were a caster which would give you more mana.
It was an interesting system that was different. I know Zehn would loathe that system, but there are ways to modify it if you don"t want to use mana.
