A) STATISTIC ROLLING: Starfighter General will ‘roll’ your character.
Traditional rolling of characters meant players would sit all day for thousands of rolls til they got the best character, akin to grinding before the game. This is lame so most do not have this.
I give a limited number of rolls per day, so you will run out and play your character while still having the fun of rolling.
There’s little incentive to multi account since there’s enough crew to get a good roll on vs the hassle.
So Starfighter General will have character rolls! I am not aware of other MMORPG able to have cracked the design on this one.
B) SKILLS: Starfighter General uses the Intergalactic Bounty Hunter unpublished RPG ruleset: www.crystalfighter.com/igbh. Its been called the most fun pencil and paper RPG ruleset ever and I wasn’t going to use it since MMOS normally have a different progression, but I dropped down the attributes to fractions knowing D&D online was successful. So get ready for the most fun PNP RPG ruleset ever!!!
Now skills are just like Wasteland, later Fallout series. I took D&D, made armor actually reduce damage(for real), and added skills related to attributes. It rules… Straight rules. Problem is… When you start the game, some skills are super less useful than others… Like in space, you ain’t going to be throwing hand grenades much… Even if you do simulated bar fights on stations, you ain’t goin to be throwing hand grenades as much as repairing your ship or shooting plasma bolts…. So I was at an impasse when letting people choose their skills. I know if I let the character creation go unmodified and people chose skills at the start there would be many many many gimped characters for the first run.
Gimped characters are players who realize they made bad choices in character select weeks ago and then play the game with “buyers remorse” thinking to either remake the character or just push on knowing they’ll never be that strong. As a MMORPG designer, you never want your players to get a “my character is gimped mentality”. It is mitigated by buffing weak stuff in patches, but knowing your core design will lead to it, you have to avoid it.
I did this by removing the starter skill selection screen completely! Instead, you will play the game skill less. You can still attempt using skills in game without a skill, but you have a -5 penalty. You can even learn skills just by getting really lucky using skills over and over again. So its not big deal to start with no skills…
The kicker is when you try to do something in Starfighter General, it will tell you what skill you used so you know what to train later if you like doing that activity a lot. Then you’d have to seek out a trainer for that skill, pay em or do a quest or something. Then boom, you have the skill, consciously knowing you wanted it for what your character would be, viola, no gimping…
Of course your role you want late game may be different than early… Then you may want to roll a new crew member for that purpose. One crew member probably won’t do it all anyway. You do want many crew members for many purposes, especially when you staff your capital ships later.