Sand Houses and Class Design Documents

There is a trend with certain MMO games to 'change everything' every once and a while in order to shake things up. Specifically, class builds is what I am thinking of here, and in particular, the mage class in the new World of Warcraft expansion. The class does not play as it used to, with most area-of-effect powers gone, crowd control very limited, and a focus on player-versus-player builds and options. It probably makes sense given a renewed push for PvP combat, and the game has seen this sort of massive change to classes with every major patch.

It brings up an interesting point, how much can you keep changing things? Players expect things to work a certain way, and when that is taken away, it is a negative experience. Do this too much, and players lose interest. In many pen-and-paper games, the concept of the core classes and what they did remained the same. It took D&D4 to do any major rethink work on class roles, and this was mainly in response to the MMO world. For the most part, the core roles and abilities are what players expect to see, and you see a return to this in D&D5.

A strong class design lays out goals, and designs powers and abilities to meet those goals. If you were to define two types of mages, say a fire mage and an ice mage, you would do well to create a design document for the two of them, and clearly lay out what they can do, and what they excel at.

In our sample fire mage, let us say fire mages are experts at area-of-effect attacks and damage-over-time spells - fireballs and ignite type effects. A design document for ice mages could emphasize single-target damage abilities, blizzards, and the cold-as-slow effect. You should probably go into great detail about the specific roles of each, and make each class a solid choice in the design document. You need to answer the question, "What can this class do?" You also need to answer, "Is this class a unique and satisfying choice?"

With your design documents, you can design your classes with the rules. Keeping the concept apart from the rules is key here, if your rules change or you need to balance things, you don't have to change the concept. Also, the idea players have of the class in their heads will most likely match the design document, rather than the rules, so you can tweak things without the fear of totally changing everything for players who like the class. The goal in structured class design is to lay out the big ideas first, and then do the fiddly rules implementations later.

MMOs sometimes change things to create controversy, and keep players interested. If the class roles in an MMO were to ever settle down, people could get bored and leave. Some MMOs are more prone to this 'class churn' than others, just because of the people that run them, and their philosophy on how they keep players interested. Some MMOs have kept pretty the same over the years in regards to class roles, and others have changed everything a couple times a year. It is all the study of marketing, keeping customers interested, and making the 'store' seem fresh and exciting. A lot of these theories trickle down into MMOs, and as a result, pen-and-paper games. They don't work all the time, and many times, how pen-and-paper games work is a totally different world than MMOs.