Class: Tracker

Title: Tracker
Role: Content Creator, Possible damage dealer
Setting: Persistent world, mmorpg, any
Idea:  The base idea of this role, class, skill. Is to create interaction. Basically if anyone is in need of a specific character, npc. Can / should hire the skills of  tracker. The rare the component, creature, item the higher skill and requirement for the  players to partly survive find the what they are looking for.

How it could work:
Either the player with this skillset initiate the tracking on  the players on initiative or by external request.

Step one:
Defining what you are looking for. Is it a player? an item? an monster? How to define could use some refinement. But in this case just say that the player has a predefined list with items and or the possibility to write in a player name. Higher skill better way to define details. And of course a tracker cannot track what he doesn't know. So even if the skill allows him to track it. Doesn't mean the list is actually populated with the content.

Ex:  start up player maybe wants to find an specific animal but as he is not experienced enough / haven't met the creature he might just be able to initiate the  skill on mammal. But a high level tracker. who already met and ore good enough knowledge about the world can initiate it on a Stonetusk Mammoth. 

Step two:
Initiate the tracking processes you meed to be somewhat close to a predefined start environment. Say are to track an mammal. They are basically everywhere assuming an earth based fantasy world. So this also means you can most likely initiate the skill anywhere. But say you want to find a brown rat. Then you might actually to know in what environment the brown rats like to even initiate the skill aka in our case maybe its more likely to actually initiate the skill in an city rather then in the middle of nowhere even though its possible. Whole point is to bring player knowledge into the skillset as well.

Step three:
Lets say you have manage to initiate  your skill tracking down a Stonetusk Mammoth. The thing here is that its basically an initiation of an event or custom quest. In the suggested case the player with the skill / initiated will see signs. No obvious eq2 golden snakes or fat arrows pointing in an direction but signs in the environment. Broken threes and so on. Sights that should be obvious without breaking immersion. And they are only available to the player or player / party with high enough skill.

Step four:
The journey. The hole thing is that its not track and spawn kind of mechanic but rather a quest. So there might be bosses in the way. There might be traps or ambushes. It might be a solo adventure it might be a group adventure or even world changing events. It all should come down to items such as environment, type of target, weather, season, age and so on. Meaning the actual player experience of person playing the tracker is going to matter.

Step five:
The journey might not be what you are looking for. But there is always a goal of the journey always something to gain. Also what you find might not be what you where looking for. Aka  you maybe needed the Elder Stonetusk Mammoth. And unless you ever found one you might not be able to track one specifically meaning you might be tracking mammoths only when you run into one of the elder version of one.

Balance:
This all can seem very powerful. And maybe would seem like a must have skill/class for everyone. But that comes down to the balance of the rest of the game. Maybe counter balance it buy having limitations to it such as high skill-points / experience points costs. But personally id see at least one player per group of players to be rather specialist in this area. If your player group is you and your partner or best friend or brother. One should be able to pick up this path to be able to instantaneously create adventure for small as big groups.

Other abilities:
It comes down to how its going to be implemented fitting with the rest of the game. Is the game based around static classes. Then maybe make the explorer some kind of support class with travel skills buffs and specialized damage dealer. If you are skilled enough to track it you will be skilled enough to kill it one day kinda approach. Or if its purely skilled based in the style of AC you can have it as a stand alone skill or skill group. Or if you are playing some kind of game that allows dual classes or multclassing with some limitation you can do the class approach but just scaled down more focused. Maybe a specialization of a scout  / ranger type of class could also be a way to go.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this place of cyberspace. This page is mostly gonna be a outlet of creative ideas, thoughts, review, design, art, code and anything possible related to multiplayer online gaming. Mind, this outlet will probably be more focused about the creative and developing and hopefully will you as a reader appreciate this as well. Hopefully this space will also be collaborative meaning it wont be just me updating it. We will see.


Current Creators / Writers:
Blakhouse:  Avid gamer of MMO since 1998 with EQ and AC. The path took him to study software development and game development. Has one lunched MMO title under his belt. Generally a code monkey and likes to talk and design around persistent world concepts. But since time is limited it usually just ends up as talk and therefore my intention is to use this outlet as a way to store / share this knowledge ideas and suggestions. And possibly point at it in the future saying "i had that idea first"! Is currently leveling his skills as an artist and if you are unlucky you will see it!


Any written on this page my be reused or included into your games and game design following the MIT license http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT. Any mention or accreditation would be appreciated.

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