just imagine... (my presumptious crazy foolhardy too imaginative ideas for balancing...)

tomasirace

well, this is an idea for an entirely new mmorpg. i'm not a programmer though, and i don't know anyone, and i have no hacking skills, so my ideas will never be fruiticious. though, i've checked up on other things out there, because i'm getting really interested in starting gaming again after a 15 year hiatus. and i was blown away, by how far... the games haven't taken anything. nothing has really caught my interest again, except for uo.

anyway, i'll start with lumberjacks and woodcrafting. professions i love.

you should be able to gain 700 points into lumberjacking. the world will be as usual with 0 in the skill, but as you reach higher skills, you'll notice tree roots where you walk, take better steps not to hurt insects of ants or make any noise, find differences between an oak and an oak, see the trees and leaves in more colour and detail, start naming them, noticing tree fairies and talking to them, and seeing if a tree is sick enough that the fairy will allow you to cut it down without murdering you with their profound magic skills.

you should also be able to max out on a single stat. 200 strength should be required to wield a valorite axe. and every single skillpoint will play in with how the weapon will turn out in blacksmithing, and secondary skills like swordsmanship (how could you craft a slashing weapon without knowing anythingabout them?) and tertiary skills like forensic knowledge - just how was the wood acquired - from farming reapers - or high up on a mountain with fresh air and the best mycorrhiza nutricion? 

there will be no more fizzles of spells or inability to use a skill or misses with a weapon. the damage and effectivity will just be reduced. no monsters will drop equippable items, only reagents and a plethora of items to be used by crafters. just as skill learning goes down if you battle too easy monsters, you'll also be granted with less loot the easier it is to kill a foe. and you might get bored from chopping easy to fell 1 day birches that you accidentally chop your hand off when soloing grizzly bears at the same time.

each item created will have variable stats from 0 to 100 in 10 decimal increments, depending on skills, where it was created, the quality of the wood, how long it's dried, how it was grown, the age of the wood, and what everyone involved in the process has eaten and slayed in their entire lifetime.

the developers wouldn't have to add any more skills, just better up on them and thus allow more builds and co-operation.

with that much strength and only a single skill, you would need a carriage with 4 frenzied ostards maxed in dexterity to allow the lumberjack to move at all without requiring a day of walking to reach the ends of town. he would still have 80 dexterity and wisdom - from eating a hefty 1 hour prepared 3-course meal by a grandmaster chef, with psychelic mushrooms, red wine and some extra pills for performance as well.

now to the chopping! to fell a tree should be just as challenging as taming a dragon or killing a demon. first someone uses their wresting skill to climb the tree and chop off twigs, remove leaves, and if need be, to chop it off in parts. wrestling could allow you to climb anything, invade houses, throw people offboard or off houses or ledges or on rocks.

but more on chopping! first you only gather twigs, maybe for camping or selling to a merchant, or for making simple items like fishing rods and piercing weapons and arrows. the better you become at cutting wood, the smoother your utensils will be, the chef will chop better on his oiled oak-cutting board, the tastier the food will be, and the more effective tools, houses (against wind, cold, soot, dust, natural disasters, break-ins, fires), and weapons will become. as you move up in skill, you'll no longer have to roll the log to a woodcuttery, papermaker or to sell to a grandmaster, and can make your own destiniy.

if i could have my way there would be no npcs at all. the entire experience would just be built-up from scratch.

as you enter the game, you choose between holy or unholy, then offensive or defensive. 

if you're holy, you'll turn into a free spirit. if you're unholy, you turn into a bacteria on the nose of... say, a swamp dragon in the deepest dungeon underground. and work yourself up from there.

if you wish, you can go down the bacteria route and give people the weekly cold, or morph to a virus that only infect fishermen who eat raw fish, turning them into mermaids eventually, and only a highly proficient item identification character will be able to tell if an item is dangerous to be around or touch.

as a free spirit, you control the elements, and only people with high level spirit speak will be able to see and communicate with you. same goes for ghouls and will o' the wisps. if two people marry and engage in lovemaking, in a week realtime the lady will give birth, and if you're lucky enough you'll get born into that body.

this also means there's a timelimit on your character, although if you reach high levels of holiness, and someone steps down from the throne, or their soul gets stealen or they turn corrupt, you can turn immortal. 

unholies can always eat corpses, blood or brains though, or project soulstones into their foreheads, so they're good to go. unless there's an archangel karma paladin around to make them surrender to the other side and become a free spirit for the first time in the their life.

now strength affects how deep a cut you make in the tree. dexterity is how often, and how many times you can strike. and stamina affects how long you can go on before having to sleep in a kingsize bed for 10 minutes and eat dinner, unless you want to make an uneven cut, or chop your foot off! free spirits would also affect dreams. or there could be things like youtube channels which are switched randomly when you sleep, for example, instead of a tv! or that you clairvoyantly learn about earlier happenings in history, or what people plot to do...

lumberjacks should be the most powerful in both pvm and pvp combat! just imagine a one ton tree falling on a beast or human, they'll get squished! this could also be the only way to get into lairs, by clearing trees and shrubbery, or using cleaned-up logs as battering rams for huge archangel- or mountaintrollking-size doors.

now, woodcrafting will never fail. you'll get crooked boards, barely usable wooden weapons that only last for 10 hits, baskets which can barely hold one fruit, pitchers that leak water - but you'll make them at least! there'll be a first-person mode for carefully angling and using your hands, as you use two mice for each arm's movement.

another idea is, you can't gain a skill unless there's a player around you which has a higher affinity in them. like masters and apprentices. or you gain quests from higher level characters. or another way - you learn skills from killing a beast which has that skill. spirit speak from demons, fire spells / resists from dragons, dexterity from horses and nightmares or from breeding and eating bunnies.

as the game will be completely player-based, and not everyone can put in 18 hours a day, you'll be able to program your character to do as you please when you're away. no bots will be needed anymore. whenever you're offline, your character keeps on breathing, living, battling, crafting and collecting materials. at 10% efficiency, 50% damage and 1% in skill advances and loot.

let's say there's a volcanic eruption summoned by a legion of free spirits at a place in the deep ocean. in a few days there's a new island that's spruced up. since there's more water creatures than sailors, the unholy notice and take over the island first. the water elementals slowly progress towards being fire based instead. and the president of the island, a fierce ancient demon, has mostly only affinity with fire spells, since it's reeking of mercury he can't cast much else. after many players have tried to attack the island, they finally find his weaknesses, stock up on demon slaying weaponry and fire resists, and learn when the real player sleeps and how his AI is programmed. so they take over the island, and turn it into a spa and sauna paradise, and lumberjacks will plant trees and flowers on the fertile ground.

how does that sound? haha. i know. will never happen. still, it's fun to dream...