You made a great point but again, your not understanding the concept.
~It's nice that it's not simply getting experience and leveling~
I never said there wouldn't be getting experience and leveling and as far as the skills go, you can customize your character more than most other games because of the large amount of choices. A good example of customizing your character with skills is SWG, was fun for about 2 days. My plan was to make it more in depth and include the cultural aspect. I have many details and opinions about this written down So I want to get everyone’s feedback from it since we are on the subject.

Seems like the big fad these days are leveling, 30, 40, 60, 75 levels in a game, most people find them selves counting mobs "If I kill 100 more yetis I will get 57" that’s what killed a lot of games for me.

My idea, which is going to need some good feedback, is a tier system. Its almost like SWG but there is more options. Take, for example, 5 tiers. (All these numbers are examples) Instead of having the experience 0/50, need 50 more exp. for tier 2, have everyone earn the level through skills and attributes. Lets say, and these are examples, before you can reach tier 2 you need to gain 2 skills and a certain amount of attributes to get it. The attributes cost experience, if you use a sword it gives you physical experience,which can give you strength and agility, if you use a bow or arrow you get keenness experience,which can get you dexterity, if you use spells you get a spiritual experience,you get the idea. With that experience you get to buy those attributes. The skills get earned through the amount of attributes you have achieved. The tiers can be called levels, and these levels can go for diff. classes. If you want to take a brute approach put everything in strength and get all attack skills. Now as far as my examples go, they may not be great, I want feedback on this tier system idea not the examples I used.

~Races in your idea aren't essentially different in any way from races in other RPGs~
Not exactly agony, your actually way off there. In this game I believe every character would start out almost the same, some races can succumb to skills easier but for overall balance on races your only going to have an advantage if you get the right attributes and skills. I believe the brutish Russian should have the ability to become a shaman if he wants but the Russian would have advantage using grappling or wrestling skills because of his cultural background and heritage. The idea of having all these races is not for one to be stronger than the other, its for cultural reasons. They start off in a different area of the world and the story lines, food they eat, skills, mobs are all different. They will naturally be stronger but if I can put it into figures it will be miniscule.
Brutes Strength 5 agility 4,wisdom 3, constitution 5, Dexterity 4
American Indian Strength 4 agility 4, wisdom 5, constitution 3, Dexterity 5
That is an example for the starting attributes, their natural attributes are very small, lets say to become a shaman you need 25 wisdom, all the brute needs is 2 more wisdom than the Indian. No one is going to choose the Indian over the brute because they want to have shamans skills. They will pick the Indian over the brute because the Indian has a cultural background of shamanistic ideas rather than the small attribute advantage.

~And the storyline sounds rather vague~
You haven’t even heard a single story line from me except for my example, which you shouldn’t take into context. There will be big story lines deriving from each culture, the main idea is the adventure, as far as the exact story lines go I and others have many story lines that have points to them. There is a reason you are going to the lost temple, you may not know it when you start the journey but when you get there you will have all good reason to start fighting the undead in that temple and the outcome will be exciting and will lead to other story lines.

Your putting a lot of words in my mouth and assuming everything you say.

~If Starcraft had 20 different races, and each race had 50 different units and 50 different building types, the game would probably have been impossible to design and implement. But it sounds really cool. But even if they successfully created it, it probably would have been insanely imbalanced. Some races would surely suck in general, certain strategies with only a very few unit types would probably be far better than all the other strategies. In the end you'd wind up with a game where only three races are really any good if you want to win, only five or so unit types from each race are really needed, and only the buildings necessary for those units manufacturing and upgrades, and a few other utility buildings are needed. But since so much time was taken to create all those other unused races, units, and buildings, these few that end up being the core of the game probably are not nearly as good or cool or balanced as they could have been if that was what the game was designed around from the beginning.~


I've mentioned 8 races agony, there will be a lot of skills in the game but they will be under control and balanced, there will be no class/ability that dominates the game. Russians may have a small advantage in a wrestling match but it wont be overpowering to the point that everyone will want to be a brute wrestler.

Now for my last reply to your post agony, you must understand, I know it will be a hard game to make there’s no questions about that. I'm trying to take your focus off the technical details and give feedback about the game play, which your doing good at. Can we stick to the game play for a while and stop talking about how hard it would be to make? Again, everyone and their mother knows it will be an extremely hard game to make.

Jook

As an academic discussion of possibilities, this is far from the most implausible system we've discussed. We've demonstrated in the past that we can have insightful conversations about unlikely projects, and I'd like to see where this idea might go.

Don't be discouraged by pessimists, Jook.

I like the idea of having to visit distant places to obtain certain skills and knowledge. If you limit a player to a single timeline, then it would be impossible to "max out" on a single character play-through, so players would have to make careful decisions about what to learn and how to train. You could spend the first third of your life learning kung-fu, the middle third studying the healing arts and crafting, and the final stage of your lifespan reflecting on the secrets of the universe.

That character would evolve from a fighter to a crafter to a mage, have considerable strength in each category, and then die off, allowing the player to try something totally new. Combined with Wavinator's notion of a dynamic world seen over multiple lifetimes, this could be a very satisfying game system.

Iron Chef Carnage thanks for that, I'm spending more time replying to guys who are off the subject so i'll just ignore them for the time being. I'm not sure about the limiting timeline, its interesting but I'd rather have peopl build their charecter for as long as they desire. The way I want to limit them from getting 1000 in all their attributes is simply increasing the cost of an attribute as you get higher, for example 1 strength would cost 50 exp, after you get to 20 strength it would go up to 75 exp for 1 strength. As far as skills are concered I think there should be a limit to how many skils you can use at once, you can get 1000 skills developed but at any given time you can only use 5, like guild wars I guess. I think that should include passive skills too, keeping 5 normal skills and 2 passive skills on at at 1 time maybe? feedback would be great there.

Why not make it so that excessive usage of some skills and lack of usage of other skills degrades those other skills and enhances the used skills.

You can't use 1000 skills all the time. Of course you need to make it easier to regain skills you lost than to acquire them from start.

I think this would tackle the problem of overpowering in everything, it would allow people to change its characters over time (if they want to), and would give a more natural feel of your characters skills
(unlike: "Yeah, I haven't fired any arrows since I was level 5 ranger ages ago, but I can Still hit a bullseye from a mile away")