Custom classes?

[Trex_Crazy]

I think it would be interesting if you could make your own classes with the available perks. Like a malefactor who is fleetfooted but also shortsighted in addition to their regular bonuses and penalties. Then probably also make it so you can only have one of the more specific traits (tailor, bowyer, etc.) I know you can just turn of the crafting restrictions to get those though. I just reallylike fleetfooted and while I like the clockmakers perks the malefactor has a better outfit (focusing on the important things I know) and the less detection range.

Just make things run a point cost and either have it so penalties give more points to spend or you have a hard maximum point cost of beneficial traits and a minimum amount of negative trait points you have to have.

Though another idea would be that each class has a "slot" that either adds on, or replaces an existing trait, a trait of your choosing. But if you choose to use the slot you have to take another bad trait.

It's also a little bit for my own roleplay ideas. Like maybe I was a tailor before commiting my crimes and becoming a malefactor. Or I was a thief before becoming a soldier so I am also good at sneaking but have a health melee penalty for it. (For the latter I'm not entirely certain if people would do that as it is not optimal at all, but again I like to roleplay my characters.)

[Rainbow Fresh]

I mean, you can already create your own classes through simple content mods. This allows anyone to do exactly what you suggest, minus it being an in-game option. The difference being, because it is a mod it's the duty and responsibility of the modder to balance things and hand them out on a server. If this were to be an in-game editor, you'd need a big multiplayer-synced framework for anyone to create a class that gets recognized by any other player at any time, reworking the entire class system to begin with. It would then also fall onto developers to come up with a fair way to balance these classes, which will then only spring forth mods again that allow bypassing this.

I've played Project Zomboid before, which has exactly this free-style character creator with "class" perks, positive and negative, to choose from. The more good you take, the more bad you need to take to balance it. Would I agree with how many point some of these traits cost? Not necessarily. Did I immediately go into the difficulty settings and uncapped points so I could, theoretically, take all positive traits as I deem many of them necessary while many of the negative, "balanced" counter-parts feel gamebreakingly annoying to me? Yep. So why go through all this trouble implementing such an in-depth system if it will eventually just lead to the same results? When the current options already cover what you need with little more work involved for yourself?

[LadyWYT]

For the vanilla game, I think a "custom class" option would nice to have, but it should be an option that's disabled by default and require the player to actually enable it in order to use it. The reason I say that, is that each class has specific lore tied to it, complete with some special class-dependent reactions from NPCs--obviously, that kind of stuff isn't going to happen with a custom class since there's no way to plan for it, so the best the player can expect is "I have no idea who you even are nor do I really have a reason to care" from NPCs. There's also the fact that premade classes are at least reasonably balanced when it comes to strengths/weaknesses, and a custom class won't necessarily be balanced. Hence why I say the player should have to enable the option themselves--that way they know exactly what they're signing up for.

And of course, for multiplayer, it needs to be a toggle, since you don't want your players making broken classes or naming them rude things.