MMORPG: PCs Jobs and Names

So players should be able to have jobs. Not only do they make great quest hooks, it should be part of who the character is. You want to fight dragons? Well then you start by becoming a grunt in the kings army. It build character. Want to see the world? Get a job as a caravan guard. Want to just run around and kill stuff? mercenary for you then. Unjobed PCs that owned property would be simply "Self employed Adventures". Those that don't would be "Vagrant adventures" ( Will save prince for food ).

With a system like this you can easily build up parties based on job type. It would be very reasonable for a group of the kings men to form a small squad and get group quests for the realm. The important thing is to not make it too binding. If you want to quit your job, you can. You no longer get as many benefits, but you learned a number of good skills. So you do your bit for queen an country, then go off with your band of friends and do some adventures, all in good fun.

This leads me to believe that the tile that you see for someone is not based off some internal class (I'm still a good believer in directed charactered classes, with skill customization ) but by the job(s) they have had. I mean if you see a plumber in full regalia on the street, you know that's a plumber, you don't know that he actually has a masters degree in pharmacology from Stanford and is just trying to make the ends meet. Right then and there, he's a plumber. As you get to know other players more, your character should learn more about them, and be able to inspect them further ( show class, some stats, etc ).

This also leads me to the idea that you should not know everyone's name right off the bat. The names and labels you see in an interface should be pulled from what you know of people, or at least can guess. Your common knowledge will tell you that a guard in uniform is a guard, but until you've interacted with him you won't know his name is Guard Johnson. Enough work with him and you begin to just know him as "Steve". The same should go for players. You should not see a name until you've had some interaction, personal conversation, grouping, etc.. This should build stronger personnel relationships between people, as well as between NPCs. Now on the flip side, for playability all this should be transparent to the end user and automatically computed by the game for them so that as you start to group up, more and more data fills in.


I've been playing with the Everquest Server Emulator. It's rather interesting to see how the back end of the MMO stuff can work. I've pondered trying to see if I could hook some of my ideas into it for testing, but not being able to mod the client sucks. If only there was more in the world for open source MMOs. :\