Horizons: Empire of Istaria Interview
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Q: When discussing your character advancement system, you mention what would be called in the tabletop roleplaying world a "skill-based" system, rather than a "class-based" system. Did you draw any inspirations from tabletop roleplaying?
A: We had a goal for Horizons that you wouldn't be asked to make important, irrevocable decisions before you could evaluate the consequence of making that decision. The class systems in tabletop and electronic gaming ask you to do exactly that. The skill systems don't, but we also didn't want player actions to become repetitive actions for the sake of skill improvement.
We ended up coining a new term for Horizons, a school-based system. There are two parts that are involved in character advancement: What you do to advance, and what advances. In a class-based system, what you do to advance is not as important as the fact that as you advance you are limited by the pre-defined class in what new actions you can take or the results of the actions you can take change. In a skill-based system what you do to advance your character's abilities is to use your skills, and the consequence of using your skills is to be rewarded by increasing skill values. This can sometimes lead to new abilities that have a prerequiste skill value. In Horizons you join a school, and while in that school, the actions that you take (quests, hunting, gathering, crafting, constructions, combat) result in increasing experience within that current school, which can also result in an increase in skills associated to that school. New abilities are gained within the school that you are currently in, but the skills are useful across all schools.
If you then decide that you want to stop training in a school and join a different school, then you can. And while in the new school different skills are improving, but the skills that you gained previously are still benefitted by your previous training. The end result is that you can mix-and-match schools to gain both improved skills and new abilities. So it isn't a pure class or skill-based system, but rather a hybrid of both which we've called schools.
We did look at both existing MMOs and tabletop roleplaying games. Some of the best game mechanics have been tested over a long period of time in tabletop gaming. I would recommend that anyone wishing to be a designer play as wide a variety of games as possible. If you only play one type of game you end up having a very narrow view of game mechanics.
