Class?

Well yes. Magic-user, cleric, fighter, thief (or whatever they translate to in a non-Fantasy world), plus the half a dozen sub-classes that differentiate this game from the next; you know, a class.

And you have to decide this when you start?

Some history: there are actually two paradigms for role-playing in massively multiplayer online games, not that you'd know it. The early MUDs that founded the genre were classless, and it was only later (through the influence of table-top RPGs) that class systems became the standard model. Because the early MUDs were developed in the U.K. and the role-playing standard co-opted by the later ones came from the U.S., the two approaches are sometimes called the "British" and "American" styles. I'm going to call them "classbound" and "classless", however, so as not to give the impression that what I'm about to say is due to any kind of nationalistic bias on my part...

I don't like classbound role-playing.

Role-playing is about the exploration of personality and identity. You fashion a character, behave as you believe that character would behave, and see where it takes you. You explore the darker and lighter sides of your own personality, experimenting with different attitudes and behaviours, rejecting some and reinforcing others. It's a quest for personal fulfilment.

Yeah, I know, not in your case, you're a perfectly well-balanced individual not interested in this kind of psychological mumbo-jumbo. You only play these games because, er, er, your friends do.

Role-playing is about being someone else, in order to become a better you.

In classbound role-playing, you set off on this journey of self-improvement with a definite goal in mind. You want to be mysterious, aloof, individual and powerful: you choose to be a mage. You want to be quick-witted, spirited, independent and lovable: you choose to be a rogue. You want to be strong, irresistible, victorious and invulnerable: you choose to be a fighter. It's aspirational: you decide where you want to go, board the train, and the game takes you there.

But it's a train. It runs on rails. If you get off, you have to start again with another character. You have no way of exploring the vast territory between the tracks. Maybe there's a branch line for people who want to be "fighters who use a bit of magic" or "thieves who thieve for good", but they're still lines. There's a whole continuum of experience out there that you have no access to; you're constrained to the occasional view through the train window of somewhere you'd like to visit but can't.

Classless role-playing doesn't have this problem. You may start off intending to be a fighter, take a job guarding merchant caravans, get involved in some minor trading so you can buy better weapons and armour, discover that you prefer the trading to the fighting, and end up as a merchant yourself. Or maybe the bandits raiding the caravans are freedom-fighters and you decide to join them, living a life on the edge as you battle the forces of oppression until eventually you find yourself arguing for a political solution. If you'd been offered at the beginning of the game the chance to be a merchant or a politician, would you have taken it? No, you wanted to be a fighter. It was the opportunity to veer off in a different direction that brought you your ultimate satisfaction, not your original aims.

Now some people - perhaps most people - want to know where they're headed on a journey before they set off. In a classless system, the argument goes, they don't get this. Offering a multitude of classes means offering a multitude of choices; classes encourage people to consider careers they wouldn't have thought of if they'd been given so much choice it meant no choice at all. In the same way that children told to "write a story" have trouble thinking of one, yet children told to "write a story about eggs" can immediately start work, so it is with role-playing: if you don't have the right kind of imagination, or the time to employ it, you're lost.

I agree with all that. Offering people predetermined choices is a good idea. What I disagree with is preventing people from changing their minds later on.

Healing magic is cast by religious types, and other magic is cast by magic-users. Magic-users don't get to cast "cure light wounds", priests don't get to cast "fireball". Maybe some contrived subclass has a bit of both, but its limits are well-defined: you get these priestly spells and these magely spells and maybe even some of your own, and that's that. People specialise at the start and they stay specialised.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. In a classless system, you can offer "character kits". In a skill-based approach, for example, you can predefine a set of character stereotypes that use common skill mixes for popular types of character. A fighter would have good initial values in those skills to do with weapon use; an artisan would eschew these in favour of skills that helped with object design and creation; a merchant kit would feature skills in appraisal, language and perhaps a broad range of other general skills. The point is that once a player chooses a kit, they're not tied to it. A fighter who decides he wants to learn some healing magic because he's sick of having to beg for cures from the imperious cleric can do so. He doesn't have to have decided a month ago that he wanted to be a paladin, he just does the necessary training and that's that. If he finds he likes casting spells and is tired of standing at the front of a melee taking hits while mages lob pieces of magic over his head from the back rank, he may decide to cut down on the fighting and learn some magic of his own. He may even become a full-time priest or mage, although having been a fighter he might want to keep his arm in, just in case one day the orcs break through and he's forced to draw his sword (why shouldn't a mage carry a sword?).

Classless systems can therefore offer the same goal-seeking character creation mechanism provided by classbound systems, only they don't constrain the players to keep to their initial decision once they start playing the game. Why should I have to throw away my character 3 months down the line when I discover I made a bad choice and necromancers aren't as kewl as I thought they would be? Why can't I just change career with the same character?

The classbound approach does profess other advantages, though. In particular, it addresses the problem of "tank mages". The word "tank" in role-playing terms has become more refined in meaning over the years, so I'll describe the basic phenomenon without assuming everyone can divine it from its name.

The argument goes something like this. If characters can become good at anything, some will become good at everything. They will be able to cast the most powerful spells, wield the mightiest swords, knit the finest cardigans, dig the deepest mines... Although classless games promise variety, all paths eventually lead to the same place and everyone paradoxically ends up the same. Only by partitioning the characters into non-overlapping, inter-dependent groups can players feel they have a role, and can diversity truly arise. There's an issue of balance, but to some extent it's self-correcting: if mages are way more powerful than priests, more people will want to be mages; however, if only priests can cast healing spells, then those who do choose to play as priests will have disproportionately more influence because their services will constantly be in demand.

This is a powerful argument, however it's borne of an assumption that the game itself is rubbish: the game world is not richly featured enough to be able to support more than one overarching goal (usually "kill stuff so you can kill more stuff") and it's only a matter of time before characters reach maximum effective levels in all the main skills.

The world should be far more sophisticated than that!

There are some halfway solutions that attempt to enable characters to change career while retaining class partitioning. Hacks such as limiting the number of skills characters can have, or implementing punishing attrition on skills that aren't used, can address the problem. After all, in real life if I learn to speak French fluently then I start learning German, I'm going to forget all the French I ever knew, am I not? Hmm, no, actually I'm not. Well I did say these approaches were hacks.

There is a solution, but it requires a confidence by game designers that their world has substance: remove skill caps. Let people continue to hone their skills indefinitely, and make it meaningful. If someone has level 30 spell-casting skills, they should not be as powerful as someone who has level 60, who in turn should not be as powerful as someone who has level 100. Sure, you might get a whole bunch of people who are level 50 in all major skills, but they'll be utility characters, not specialists. They may fare better against a wide variety of foes, but against undead a level 75 priest is going to be preferred. OK, so why don't they train themselves up to be level 75 priests (and mages, and fighters, and rogues, and basket-weavers, and teachers, and...)? Because in the time it takes them to do that, the specialist priest has reached level 150.

The levels (or whatever) do have to have meaning, though. If being a level 100 armourer is pretty much the same as being a level 200 armourer, no specialist armourer is going to waste time experimenting to try go up levels - they're effectively at top level anyway, even though in theory there isn't a "top level". So not only does a game need a wide variety of skills, but each skill needs a built-in formulaic component that ensures whatever level players attain in it, it's tangibly better than the level just below.

As a corollary, the time taken to go up a skill level can increase as the levels rise, but the curve should always approach some maximum: if it takes 3 years to get from level 100 to level 101, that's just as effective as a cap on level 100, which is bad news.

So a classless system can also address the issue of characters becoming masters of all trades (i.e. "tank mages"). All it takes is for the game to be rich and varied enough that higher-level specialist characters still have something to do. But how can a game possibly achieve that? Isn't there going to come a point where no matter what monsters have been created beforehand, some players are going to be so good in their chosen field that they can take them down with the same amount of effort they expend with a blink?

Actually, it doesn't matter. The game generates its own ramp-scaling opposition in the form of other players. If you're the world's richest person, you're in competition with the world's second-richest person whether you like it or not.

That's the beauty of massively multi-player games: they're massively multi-player.