ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Had a thought on how cool it would be to allow multi-class options for players in TOME 4.
From a design perspective, if you look at many, many examples, multi-classing is intended to provide utility to a player at the cost of power - typcially gained by specializing in a class and unlocking and mastering top tier talents / etc.
From an implementation standpoint I had a couple of fairly simple (at least in concept, I'm not the best developer in the world) ideas, if the coder gods want to try out multi-classing in TOME:
Access: You would need a trainer, located in town or wilderness to give you access to talent trees for the trainer's class
Cost - I propose a meaningful sacrifice, which can be tweaked later as needed. 5 talent points plus one talent category point to unlock the tree. Plus, the trainers would obviously have more material needs, so something like 100 gold to unlock and 25 per training session might work?
Option: You can only put points into a multi-class tree by training with your teacher
Option: Alternately, improving a multi-class talent costs 2 talent points of the appropriate type
Limitations Level 10 trees would not be available for unlocking as a secondary class. This would help keep the focus on sacrifice for utility as opposed to creating a single ungodly talent tree combo that will result in endless nerfing to compensate.

Idea: Since Cormac are flexible, maybe they get an opportunity to either have the category point at start OR unlocking a single talent tree from another class at the start of the game.

I've tried to think of the implementation above from a code standpoint where possible so it wouldn't be too tough to get in the game. There's already instances in the game where you get extra talent trees through purchase or quest, so really i just wanted to nail down the price for flexibility and see what you all thought.

How about instead of making it cost a crazy amount of talent points and whatnot, have it cost 100 gp (or the completion of a quest for the trainer, to determine whether you are a worthy student!), and give you a locked tree that you can unlock with a category point at .70 like an escort quest talent tree reward.

I thought about that, but it seems a bit too easy to me and not enough sacrifice. Right now I need a category point to unlock a new branch that's not unlocked at birth. I thought it should be something more for a multi-class option. Something extra to gain acess to talents you would not normally have access to..

Also, we would probably want to include some kind of filtering so that the player can only access trainers for classes he can start with (so if you never killed the master, no Anorthil or Sun Palding training would be offered)

Well at the moment you can already learn a tree from an escort, at 0.7 mastery and locked, even if you can't get that sort of class in the game.

Right that's a good point - depending on random encounter and if you can get the escort to safety. But there's certainly no shortage of escort quests, so you invariably would find something you would like to unlock eventually.

Also in the game is a specific unlock when defeating a boss, and ability to purchase in one of the towns.

I would think that if multi-classing were to be looked at seriously all of the above would have to be taken into account.

So possible cross-classing at the moment:

- survival tree (thief escort)
- chants (sun paladin escort)
- hymns (anorithil escort)
- combat training (last hope trainer)
- archery (last hope trainer)
- sand drake (queen's heart)
- blood magic (corruptor)

The last doesn't work too well due to lack of resource replenishment, though that'll change in the coming beta.

What others would you suggest?

Charlatan73 wrote: Limitations Level 10 trees would not be available for unlocking as a secondary class. This would help keep the focus on sacrifice for utility as opposed to creating a single ungodly talent tree combo that will result in endless nerfing to compensate.

The general limitation on escorts quests at least has been generic trees only. From a design perspective I don't want to be asking myself how game breaking it would be to give Wyrmics Strength of Purpose or Mages Quantuum Feed. Class talents are class talents for a reason, they're not meant to go to just anybody and could cause some serious balance problems if they did.

I think existing system is better. More cross-class talents could be added eventually. Beside that some of existing classes are broad enough to have different specializations inside them(especially hybrid fighter-mages)