Steampunk Isometric RPG

[chrisinajar]

Although we have not officially decided yet as to what game we're doing, I want to flesh out the steampunk RPG game a bit... If you posted an idea and want to flesh it out more also, then by all means make a thread. I created the Game Design board so that having lots of threads isn't a big deal.

If you have a better idea for any of these things, or just don't like a concept, lemme know, this is thread is for open discussion on the steampunk RPG game.

This is a slow work in progress, I keep editing it with new and interested ideas.

Settings
So, basically due to the generic steampunk reasoning, there is a giant self aware robot that is creating other robots to destroy mankind. Think 9, for those of you who saw that movie. You're a human and a soldier in a war against robots. All the enemies are partially or entirely robotic and function in a hive-mind.
Steampunk can be really gay and a lot of people who like it are really gay. But when it comes down to it, we're all a bit obsessed with steampunk. Because of this, and the fact that we're competent and not a bunch of faggots, with a few exceptions (*cough* FuLLBLeeD *cough*), we can pull it off...

Classes
Mother Fucking Engineer!
In just about every single game ever that has an Engineer or a Necromancer, they fucking suck. They're the worst class in the game and have a skill ceiling so low you can barely stand up. I want a GOOD engineer class. He'll have a mixture of stationary and mobile things he can build with much of his power coming from the items he has equipped augmenting his creations. The minions shouldn't be completely self sufficient, and should require lots of attention and micromanaging to make them good. This will be a thinking man's class, depending a lot on placing the right things at the right time and keeping track of all of your creations very well. He'll have mechanics for healing existing creations to keep them alive... I will be paying a lot of attention to this class, and I will definitely main this class. I don't want him to be OP -- every engy player out there likes having their class hard to play -- but I want him to be viable.
Engineer Pros: With a small army to fight for you it's easy to stand back and never take a hit. So long as you keep your shit running, you really have nothing to worry about.
Engineer Cons: Playing this class will require a large amount of attention and micromanaging to make sure the battle stays in your favor and make sure your numbers stay up high. Not paying attention for even a moment could easily cost you the battle.

Tank
He needs a new name.
Tank is a clinically insane blood thirsty brute. His primary functions revolve around attracting everyone around him to himself and then, in a raging fit, pummeling everyone around him until there's nothing left to pummel. The more interest he has the stronger he becomes, being fueled by the battle. He has abilities that raise his interest to insane levels, making everything go all out on him. While his gameplay is dangerous, so is he. While inventors are standing back with their fancy-shmancy gadgets, the tank is dead center beating everything with his chainsword. Some of his combat skills include sudden bursts of adrenalin giving him temporary super human strength and speed, or unleashing an AoE blast to get the countless robots up off your grills.
Tank Pros: He can take a beating, and does so volentarily. This makes him extremely useful in team situations where those other pussies don't want to get hit as much, a Tank/Inventor combo can be very deadly.
Tank Cons: With all that armor on him and all that adrenalin pumping through his veins, using puny guns is almost entirely out of the question, as is moving quickly. Also, his all-in fighting style can easily put him in a situation where he's bighting off more than he can chew, especially as his interest level goes up and up. It'll be very important to pick your fights and watch both your health and interest levels to make sure you keep in control of the battle. A cocky tank is swarmed and overpowered easily.

Inventor
Basic elemental character. He invents devices to wear onto the field. While his damage is huge do to his insane gadgets, he's still just a scientist and therefore is basically made of tissue paper. His primary weaponry consists of 3 elements: Fire, electricity, and steam. Fire is extremely high damage, electricity has disabling effects, and steam does AoE damage.
Inventor Pros: With his crazy inventions at his disposal, he can deal out more damage per second than any other class in the game. His stuns are effective, his AoE is great crowd control, and his nukes are devastating.
Inventor Cons: He's not a soldier. He's made of tissue paper, as opposed to the thick skinned brutes you see fighting along side him. Because of this looking at him wrong basically kills him. If you loose control of the battle and don't have a meat shield or a quick way out, you're dead faster than you can blink.

Assassin
He needs a new name and a description
Assassin Pros: None.
Assassin Cons: He doesn't exist yet.

Classlessness
That's a lot of "ss"...
A given character is not locked into a class, nor does he select a class at any point. You buy into a class using generic experience points, and as you play as that class you gain experience points for that class's skill tree. Your current class is dictated by the equipment you're currently wearing, so if you have the Inventor's fire hose equipped then you are at least part Inventor. "Generic" experience points are spent on personal stats and advancements of class proficiency, but not on actual class skills. The class specific skill trees will be similar to normal skill trees while also requiring higher and higher class proficiency as you go down, as opposed to high levels.
Because your equipment dictates what class you are and what skills you can use, this disables you from making a "perfect" character... A perfect tank will be wearing 100% tank specific equipment, while a perfect engy will be wearing all engy stuff. A mix of the two would cripple both, but allow you access to at least parts of both trees. This limitation applies to passive skills too.
The amount of experience required to up a given skill point, both on the general tree and class specific, is based on the following three variables: Skill level, it takes more points to put fire blast from level 14 to 15 than it does 1 to 2... Depth in the skill tree, the end game abilities will obviously cost more than the abilities available to you at level 1... Current player level, if a level 80 Inventor starts specking tank, he's going to be getting a lot more experience than a level 1 tank, and therefore his skills should cost accordingly more. Those three variables will need a great deal of gameplay testing to get balanced right...

Interest
The enemy is a massive farm of AI robots, and is therefor hive-minded. If you're player sparks their interest, they're going to go more out of their way to kill you. This can be a fun challenge for higher level players, attempting to survive wave after wave of increasingly difficult opponents. This will often be a high level group activity, because if you can survive the crazily difficult waves the drops will be well worth it, killing a wave of enemies stronger than most bosses. Think WoW raid but it comes to you instead.
Some characters can use interest to their advantage or disadvantage, such as the assassin class can get bonuses the lower the interest they have on them, while the tank class might be fueled by battle and become stronger and stronger as his interest level grows. Some items will have interest multipliers, insanely awesome high tech items will catch the eye of the hive mind making it hard to fight in one place for too long if you're using it.
This is a concept originally thought up as a method of enforcing anti-exploitative rules.  The conversation that led to it was on PvP, which we concluded that the PvP method we like best is that one party challenges, the other party must accept, and you can configure your character to auto-accept if you want. PvP will give good experience which is why people will want to do it, other than sport. Then the issue of PvP farming came up, what if I let you're level 1 character kill me level 150 over and over to farm experience? Interest. So, we can attempt to track exploitative things such as PvP farming and then send swarms of monsters after them to stop them.

Suggestions please!

Also, if any of you art peeps think it's good idea, how about some concept art?

[Trazgo]

For the classic spell-caster class, maybe The Alchemist or The Elementalist for a name.  He could have a generator of some kind that he wears on his back, and a glove that sends out electricity like a tesla coil. 

He could also have some other kinds of attacks like maybe a hose from the pack that leads down to arm onto the glove that could send out fire or steam or something to add more options for specialization.  Fire would do the most damage, electricity could disable a little, steam could be AoE damage, something like that.

[chrisinajar]

I vote "Inventor" for that... Basically he made a whole bunch of gadgets to help him fight. He's different from the Engineer in that he creates things that he wears and uses in combat, where the engineer makes things that are self-contained and makes them on the field... Inventor doesn't make things on the field, only uses them...

[Trazgo]

Yeah Inventor is a better name.

Another class could be the Assassin/Hitman/Marksman/Whatever.  Basically a damage type character that could have different specializations like long range rifles, mid range pistols, or close range weapons like motorized blades or something.  He/she could also have throwing weapons since that would fit.  This character would probably do a lot of damage, but die quickly under fire.  He/she might also get some weak disables like maybe a slowing poison attack to keep enemies at range for a little while longer, but nothing too strong.

[Tetrodotoxin]

Something like a druid, Werewolf's always seem to fit in to steampunk in my opinion,If we incorporate a day/night system, his shape will be based on the time of the day. Possibly a shady bloke, torn up trench coat, very western esque with a hat, Almost like Lucas Sim's from Fallout III. some sort of steam punk equivalent to a mage would also be needed, but we need to make sure he/she is not too OP, most mages end up having low health but spells that can fuck shit up.

Also, Maybe split the inventor intop two subtypes maybe, AOE Inventions (Bombs,Suicide trains...etc)and assassination Inventions(Such as tiny Bottle Rockets, Potato Cannon, etc..) unless we do skill trees/sets.

[chrisinajar]

some sort of steam punk equivalent to a mage would also be needed, but we need to make sure he/she is not too OP, most mages end up having low health but spells that can fuck shit up.

For the classic spell-caster class, maybe The Alchemist or The Elementalist for a name.  He could have a generator of some kind that he wears on his back, and a glove that sends out electricity like a tesla coil. 

He could also have some other kinds of attacks like maybe a hose from the pack that leads down to arm onto the glove that could send out fire or steam or something to add more options for specialization.  Fire would do the most damage, electricity could disable a little, steam could be AoE damage, something like that.

Inventor
Basic elemental character. He invents devices to wear onto the field. While his damage is huge do to his insane gadgets, he's still just a scientist and therefore is basically made of tissue paper.

What did I say about reading before posting?

[Tetrodotoxin]

What did I say about reading before posting?

Even after i read the whole spheal about the elementalist name, wtf is wrong with me.

[Trazgo]

An important part of any RPG is pretty much teaching how to play, so how should we go about that?  Most RPGs start out by having the character spawn at a camp full of easy quests, but that's kind of cliche.

Maybe you could start by regaining conciousness on the deck of some kind of fast moving large vehicle that's currently being chased and has all kinds of stuff shooting at it and some panicked character tells you to run somewhere. (Basically it's getting you used to the character movement.)  Then after you get to wherever you were told you can take some weapons from the armory (learning how to pickup stuff) and learn the Combat system by killing some of the enemies that are now beginning to board your vehicle.  That kind of beginning sets the mood for a game in my opinion.

[chrisinajar]

Some ideas Brendan and I talked about today, not completely fleshed out to the fine details, but these are the concepts... Lemme know what you guys think...

Classlessness
That's a lot of "ss"...
A given character is not locked into a class, nor does he select a class at any point. You buy into a class using generic experience points, and as you play as that class you gain experience points for that class's skill tree. Your current class is dictated by the equipment you're currently wearing, so if you have the Inventor's fire hose equipped then you are at least part Inventor. "Generic" experience points are spent on personal stats and advancements of class proficiency, but not on actual class skills. The class specific skill trees will be similar to normal skill trees while also requiring higher and higher class proficiency as you go down, as opposed to high levels.
Because your equipment dictates what class you are and what skills you can use, this disables you from making a "perfect" character... A perfect tank will be wearing 100% tank specific equipment, while a perfect engy will be wearing all engy stuff. A mix of the two would cripple both, but allow you access to at least parts of both trees. This limitation applies to passive skills too.
The amount of experience required to up a given skill point, both on the general tree and class specific, is based on the following three variables: Skill level, it takes more points to put fire blast from level 14 to 15 than it does 1 to 2... Depth in the skill tree, the end game abilities will obviously cost more than the abilities available to you at level 1... Current player level, if a level 80 Inventor starts specking tank, he's going to be getting a lot more experience than a level 1 tank, and therefore his skills should cost accordingly more. Those three variables will need a great deal of gameplay testing to get balanced right...

Interest
The enemy is a massive farm of AI robots, and is therefor hive-minded. If you're player sparks their interest, they're going to go more out of their way to kill you. This can be a fun challenge for higher level players, attempting to survive wave after wave of increasingly difficult opponents. This will often be a high level group activity, because if you can survive the crazily difficult waves the drops will be well worth it, killing a wave of enemies stronger than most bosses. Think WoW raid but it comes to you instead.
Some characters can use interest to their advantage or disadvantage, such as the assassin class can get bonuses the lower the interest they have on them, while the tank class might be fueled by battle and become stronger and stronger as his interest level grows. Some items will have interest multipliers, insanely awesome high tech items will catch the eye of the hive mind making it hard to fight in one place for too long if you're using it.
This is a concept originally thought up as a method of enforcing anti-exploitative rules.  The conversation that led to it was on PvP, which we concluded that the PvP method we like best is that one party challenges, the other party must accept, and you can configure your character to auto-accept if you want. PvP will give good experience which is why people will want to do it, other than sport. Then the issue of PvP farming came up, what if I let you're level 1 character kill me level 150 over and over to farm experience? Interest. So, we can attempt to track exploitative things such as PvP farming and then send swarms of monsters after them to stop them.

[Trazgo]

Sounds cool to me, I think that the more options a player has the better.  Also interest seems like a cool way to combat that sort of farming while also adding depth to the game.

[chrisinajar]

someone who likes playing tank classes write up a basic description of how that class will work, and also name him something less gay.

same with assassin

[Tetrodotoxin]

Turn based or Real time combat?

[chrisinajar]

i would assume real time, like D2 style... Hasn't been discussed yet, if you have an interesting battle system then by all means post it. Otherwise I think we'll default to real time with skill cool-downs...

[chrisinajar]

A slight alteration to the "interest" system:
As you're interest goes up, more and more enemies will agro you and choose to fight you over enemies. When you do things to intentionally increase your interest you'll never push it past the threshold where the hive starts throwing everything it has at you (the wave challenge described earlier)... So at the highest possible "natural" interest everything around you will just aggressively pursue destroying you at all costs, often ignoring closer targets in favor of you.

Someone think of a good name for the tank class, until that point i will continue calling him tank

Tank Mechanics:
Tank is a clinically insane blood thirsty brute. His primary functions revolve around attracting everyone around him to himself and then, in a raging fit, pummeling everyone around him until there's nothing left to pummel. The more interest he has the stronger he becomes, being fueled by the battle. He has abilities that raise his interest to insane levels, making everything go all out on him. While his gameplay is dangerous, so is he. While inventors are standing back with their fancy-shmancy gadgets, the tank is dead center beating everything with his chainsword. Some of his combat skills include sudden bursts of adrenalin giving him temporary super human strength and speed, or unleashing an AoE blast to get the countless robots up off your grills.
Tank Pros: He can take a beating, and does so volentarily. This makes him extremely useful in team situations where those other pussies don't want to get hit as much, a Tank/Inventor combo can be very deadly.
Tank Cons: With all that armor on him and all that adrenalin pumping through his veins, using puny guns is almost entirely out of the question, as is moving quickly. Also, his all-in fighting style can easily put him in a situation where he's bighting off more than he can chew, especially as his interest level goes up and up. It'll be very important to pick your fights and watch both your health and interest levels to make sure you keep in control of the battle. A cocky tank is swarmed and overpowered easily.

Imma write up some pros/cons for the existing two classes up in the original post too, along with adding this description... If someone has a better tank design post it, I'm writing these because no one else is.

[Trazgo]

Here's an attempt to revamp the Assassin.

The Concocter

The Concocter is a cunning assassin who is very skilled in the fine art of biological warfare.  Utilizing everything from cyanide coated weapons to tear gas his only task is to make sure the enemy stops moving, one way or another.  Some of his abilities include poisoning his melee weapons (haven't decided what sort of weapons yet), releasing clouds of gas such as tear gas to blind enemies, nerve agents to put enemies to sleep (until attacked), and syringe injections of even more deadly concoctions that can paralyze (stun) enemies or do extensive damage.

Pros: Lots of Crowd Control, Moderate Damage
Cons: Reasonably fragile and needs to be in melee range for many of his abilities, so if you screw up you're going to die.

[Tetrodotoxin]

Realtime Would be the best to offer. very D2 Style with Cool downs, to be sure your not waiting 5+seconds to use your skill agian.
Also, regarding the stats system,if its a classless game, how will people be fragile, where you can have for example Trazgo's assasin that can just pour into str and be a buff Fragile tank. Maybe we could have the skills add to attributes instead of attribute points.

Another possible class idea.

Contractor, Very ninja-esque, but not nessicereally a ninja, deals primarally with highdamage to single targets, little to no splash damage,possible able to Dip weapons in herbal mixtures for added effects(maybe even party members?) (exploding Knife?) quite simmilar to the assasin, but more ranged than pointblank.
Pro's:ranged attacks, high damage/attacks open wounds,Fast Movement/Multishot possible
Cons:Low Health,Relitively short distances for range attacks, easily damaged.

[chrisinajar]

Hmm, I would alter him to be less fragile, as we currently have 2 fragile and 1 not... I like the concept for a tech class that is based on stuns and stuff like that, as opposed to direct damage. I would say that his major cons should be no good direct damage, he's all about stuns and poisons...

[FuLLBLeeD]

I think Iron Knight would be a good idea for the Tank class. A guy wearing what amounts to a shit ton of armor, with a shotgun as a primary weapon or maybe a minigun.

[Tetrodotoxin]

I think Iron Knight would be a good idea for the Tank class. A guy wearing what amounts to a shit ton of armor, with a shotgun as a primary weapon or maybe a minigun.

Fallout 3 Type Power Armour?

And yeah Chris I like that better.

[FuLLBLeeD]

Fallout 3 Type Power Armour?

And yeah Chris I like that better.

A steampunk version of a BrotherHood of Steel Member perhaps.

[Xx_sasukefan85_xX (jeed)]

Paladin/Spellsword type class? That would bring you to two durable, two squishy.  Monk/brawler as well, perhaps.  Enchanter/mesmer type is also another token class.

[FuLLBLeeD]

This is not going to be a JRPG style game is it?

[Tetrodotoxin]

More like Diablo style broski.
Good JRPG's are hard to make, only three that ive actually enjoyed, be it boring/stupid combat, or piss annoying random encouters, it would turn out shitty if we pull it in that direction imo.

[chrisinajar]

Since the game is classless, I vote we call the classes professions...

Some ideas...

So, it was asked how in a classless system a given character can be squishy, despite not actually being that class. So, each class has a class proficiency. Your class proficiency skill is upped with the general skill points and your current proficiency of a given class dictates how deep into that classes skill tree you can traverse. So, for example, to get the best Inventor skill you'd need all it's prerequisites on the tree along with an Inventor proficiency of at least X... Class proficiencies, in addition to giving you access to the skills, also have lots of passive modifiers. You get the passive bonuses from whatever your current primary profession is.
Skill Tree Intersection - Sometimes multiple professions will share a given skill. As opposed to putting the same skill, or skills with the same effect but different names, the skill trees will actually intersect at certain points. At these intersection points you can actually walk across into the other skill tree, and start traversing down (or up).
Skill tree buy-in - In addition to profession proficiency requirements a given skill requires X number of skill points to have been spent on that skill tree (Borderlands style)... This makes the interesting not completely broken, but still great for making interesting builds.

[Trazgo]

If we set up the skill-trees properly the classes/professions will balance themselves out.  If a tank picks up damage skills, he'll have to sacrifice some of his Tankiness to get it and end up being a new sort of hybrid that is sturdier than the Inventor, but not as damaging.

Basically make it so that if you want to be uber damaging you need to go completely into the Inventor tree, but that'll also make you uber fragile.  Conversely, going full tank tree makes you a walking wall, but your damage pales in comparison to an Inventor.  (The damage should still be decent enough that a pure tank isn't super-boring solo though)