Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games have been a passion of mine for many years ever since I logged on The Imperial Fortress BBS in the early 90’s and played Tele-Arena 3.0. All throughout the late 90’s I created and helped run a MUD here and there. I’ve always had that armchair developer in me. I’ve had a few ideas rolling around in my head about how to make a fun MMORPG in the post-WOW era and I want to put them down somewhere. This is more of a mental exercise than anything else, and maybe someone will read them and agree. Many of these ideas are based off of MUDs I’ve played in the past.

I have no idea how long this is going to be, if there are going to be multiple parts, or even if I’m going to finish this post but you’ve been warned. The following is most likely going to be drivel.

Game Description
There is no game title, and shall referred to as “The Game” from here on out.

The Game is a faction based player vs. player DIKU style RPG title. The object of The Game is get the most kill points and have the best equipment. The Game has a classless structure where a player’s job or role is defined by his or her skill set. A player’s power in The Game is based on his gear and his skill development. A player gains equipment through PVE encounters and through full-loot PVP combat.

The object of the game, as mentioned, is to have the most kill points and best equipment. In the game at all times is a list of the top “X” players with the most kill points and a list of players with the best equipment score. The equipment score is based off of all accumulated stats of the player with his or her equipment on. These lists are continuously being updated.

Factions and Game Size
Nothing is instanced in The Game.

Game servers would have a small maximum online population. Without further study or analysis, a maximum online population of at most 500 players seems sufficient utilizing three factions.

With a smaller online population the physical size of the game world can be substantially smaller. With a smaller game world, player vs. player interaction will happen more often. With a smaller population this small game world will not become overcrowded.

Balance between online population and game size is extremely important. As your online population grows you most also increase the size of your gaming world to accommodate them. This has several side effects. First, you immediately begin to increase the time to travel between the locations in your world. Second, the larger the game world the more spread out players are at varying times of the day leading to less and less PVP encounters.

The smaller the online population the greater the impact of a single player can have. However, with such smaller overall populations, faction balance becomes incredibly harder to manufacture. If a single player has greater impact then you must be incredibly conscious of faction population. With three factions, of which none have an advantage over the other, it may be easier to balance out one or the other.

Population controls in games like Aion have worked quite well, others include dynamic buffs based on online numbers.

Character Advancement and Gameplay

As mentioned previously, characters in The Game have no levels. Their advancement is based on skill development and equipment. The maximum level a skill can obtain is based off a player’s base stats. An example of this is if your character has high dexterity, you may learn the dodge skill to a high level. The number of skills and spells a character can learn is based strictly on your race. Equipment has no skill, stat or any other requirement. Any item can be worn by any player of any advancement level.

Character Creation: Stat and Race Selection

Character creation is simple, you choose your stats and your race.

Stat Selection
Stat distribution can be done a few different ways during character creation. It can be done by rerolling repetitively with player inputted weights towards stats and eventually get lucky with the numbers you want, or you can have players manually set their stats.

The argument could be made that giving a new player an important decision of stat placement right away may be to much of a choice right away which favors the rerolling method. However, rerolling repetitively puts emphasis of sitting at character creation for hours hoping to get the “right combination”. A combination of the above might be applicable with further analysis.

You can not, however, have preset stat allocations as the standard. The skill, spell and stat system is based off of free choice and ease of customization.

Race Selection

Race selection will be the first choice a player makes. The race you choose determines how many spells and skills you may learn in The Game. For example if you choose to be a Human you will have (the following numbers are arbitrary) 15 skills slots and 18 spell slots. Allowing you a more balanced build, whereas an Elf may have 6 skill slots and 28 spell slots. Because of this system, you will have the option to choose from many races from High Skill/Low Spell races to Low Skill/High Spell races and everything in between.

Each race will have associated racial benefits and deficiencies.

Each factions will have the same races to choose from, this will further assist faction balance.

The Skill and Spell System
All skills and spells can be learned by anyone as long as the meet the skill requirements.

Skill are separate from spells. All skills are on a tree, similar to a Tech Tree from games like Civilization and Masters of Orion. For example, if you want to learn Dual Wielding, you would need to learn One-Handed Slashing, One Handed Piercing, Enhanced Damage, and Armor Penetration. Spells work in a similar method.

Skills range from things like Blocking, Dodging, Parrying, Weapon Specialization to Tackling, Tracking, and Shout Buffs.

Spells range from armor and damage buffs, to healing to damage.

An example build would be a heavy melee class with limited spell slot selections. Those limited spell slots can be anything from small heal spells to buffing spells to small magic damaging spells but because of the lack of spell slots, that character will not be able to get anything more advanced.

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That’s it for now. Next time I’ll elaborate on the Combat and Gameplay elements. How skills and equipment factor in top-X lists, what you actually do, how equipment is gained, and how pvp works.