Right now my mud is working on a remort system for the mud. The few mud admins I've talked to about this have said they don't like the way remort system affected their mud. I'd like to avoid the pit falls that other mud admins have had and would love to hear from other mud admins who have implemented a remort system on their mud.

We've declined to use one, because our game is competitive in nature. As such, we design our classes to compete evenly with one another, which goes against the usual remort system of allowing access to "super classes" or mixed classes ("retain X benefits from your old class").

If you allow players to remort to get extra benefits, you now have an uneven playing field between them and the "regular" players. If you let them remort with no extra benefits, it's just asking them to start over for no benefit. and why would they do that?

If your game isn't competitive by nature (zero PvP, etc.), this might work well for your Achiever-y base, as it creates a difficult task to shoot for. It's also low effort on your part-- instead of having to design 2x (or more) as much content, you make up some remort benefits and have your players experience the same content 2+ times to get them all.

Most of the games I have played which have incorporated a remort system have faced tremendous balancing and bias challenges, none of which lead toward a happy playerbase.

If it is too late in your design to back away from classes, consider replacing the remort direction by allowing the addition of sets of non-class skills and spells at specific points in the process, without requiring the player to lose a pre-ordained class or compromise strategies of skill development.

In the older days of Clandestine, we used a remort system - the idea was that by the time you remorted, you had a better idea of how to play the game. The problem is that the remort classes were incredibly lacking in power(and therefor not useful for roleplayers who wanted to be able to level also) and that the gameplay changed after you remorted, often causing the player to have to relearn many elements of the game.

New players would either find someone to speed level them so that they could quickly remort and play the "real game", or would never remort and be immensely underpowered, or would just become frustrated and quit. Hence why we got rid of our early remort system.

We had talks of a new "tier" system that would create a seperate continent for each "tier" - each as indepth and fun as the others. Remorting, per se, in this instance would allow you access to a new world(at the cost of leaving the old one behind). We decided that this would alter the foundations of our game play too much, and the idea was scrapped - but it is a route you could go if you were truly interesting in a balanced remort system that did not favor any particular "tier".

The Mud I play (4 Dimensions) has a different approach to the remort system than the ones described so far. Basically when you remort, your hitpoints go down drastically, but are still a bit better than a first remort char at level 1, and you keep your maxmana and maxmove, so for each remort the char grows stronger. I guess it's an alternative to adding more levels, since there are only 50 of those in the game.

You can switch class when you remort, (there are 8, each with 4 tiers) or stay in the same class, to reach Mastery in it. The system seems to be reasonably balanced, but of course, as the players get stronger for each remort, a tier 4 oldtimer with countless remorts is a lot stronger than a tier 4 of the same level with only one remort. But that seems pretty logical to me.

Below is the Helpfile for it:
Usage: remort <class>
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Your character can have up to 4 different classes. When you start the game you start with a single class, and once you have reached level 50 in that class, you are given the option to REMORT into a new class or the same class.
*
You will transform into that class as a level 1, keeping most of the skills from your previous class as well as your maxmana and maxmove.
The benefits of remorting include increased movement and mana points, and larger array of skills.
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This special feature of 4D allows you to you the choice of either spreading your skills out over several classes or specializing in one class to reach perfection in it. This means that your character will grow in strength and power each time you remort.
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Specializing means going through all the tiers in the same class, up to tier 4, level 50. Once you remort out of this, you have MASTERED the class. Each class mastery gets a different special bonus.
If you then remort into a new class, you'll obtain the spells/skills from your previous tiered class, at the right level, up till tier 2, plus the new skills/spells tier 1 from your new chosen class. Once you've become tier 3 in your new class however you'll only have skills/spells from tier 1 from your original class. Once you've become tier 4 you'll only have the skills/spells
from your current class, while those of your first class will be 'forgotten'.
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Once you have mastered all 8 classes, you will become a GRANDMASTER.
Grandmasters are stronger than regular classes, because they receive a combination of most skills in the game, up to a certain level.

I must admit, I'm not much of a fan of remorting - it feels far too much like throwing away all my work and starting over. In fact, every time I hear it, the first thing that comes to mind is the original D&D 'immortals' set, where they described how someone who had reached the top level of immortality could choose to start back at level 1, and if they could work their way up through all the levels again, become immortal again, and rise to the highest immortal rank once more, they'd "win" the game. Yuck.

If you want remorts as a status symbol, or to provide a large range of potential classes without confusing newbies with data overload, then a tiering/subclassing system could handle that - at certain points during advancement the player could change their class. For example, upon reaching level 10 an apprentice might be forced to choose a new class from 'mage', 'sorcerer', 'alchemist', 'elementalist', etc. They'd remain level 10, and retain all of their apprentice spells (or more accurately each of the apprentice subclasses would also have all of the apprentice spells), but before they could advance further they'd have to choose the route they wanted to take. Supposing they selected 'elementalist' - at level 20, they might then have to specialise further by choosing which type of elemental magic they favour.

On the other hand, if you just want players to reuse the same content, why not concentrate on making each of the classes sufficiently different that players will want to create alts of each class? A good example of this, IMO, is Diablo2 - I don't know anyone who only ever played one of the characters. If you really want certain classes to only be unlocked by experienced players, you could still do it this way (using an account system) by allowing them access to new options based on the progress of the original character. The major difference is that they'd still have their old character as well.

One other way I have seen remorting work is used on Dawn of Demise. There you pick your starting class/race combo and each class has a prime requisite that allows is to be raised slightly higher than their other stats. They when they reach level 100 they have the option to remort as a second class, and start back at level 1 of the second class almost exactly like a normal character, with no bonuses whatsoever, except for the eq they had on them, and one twist, their one stat that can be raised above the others does not change, it stays to what it was from their first class. Then when they get the second class to level 100 they get all the spells/skills back from their original class. But because the prime requisite stays with you when you remort a mage/cleric is essentially quite different than a cleric/mage for example. In pratice dual avved characters are generally stronger than normal avs as a general rule, but not always as dual avs don't have double the hp, or mana..just the skills/spells of two classes.

i'm not a mud admin, just a player at avatar.

we have remort, one of the major items in the help is that you don't get a supreme or overpowered char by remort.  just a varied race or class that is still balanced and comprable to others.

actually we have race remort, class remort, rebuild, and prestige classes.

remorts require work as you have to ascend through mortal levels, hero levels, and lord.

prestige opens access to unique classes not available via remort.  with prestigue you only need to make mort 50.



they all open other races and classes, with unique skills but balancing detractors also.  so you have your basic cleirc, that can lord and remort into a priest.  better healing, broader range of group affectlng skills but lacking the ability to tank or fight.  you have your archer, that can become a prestigeous fusiler at Lev 50... better damage mostly to large sized mobs AND the arc has to be small sized.  you have your lizardman that can ascend to lord and remort as a three eyed tuatar or your elf that can become a high elf, or you psion that can become a mindbender, or your liz, trog, drg rogue that can be come a black circle initiate, etc...

i think its pretty nifty.

Just a quick comment as moderator: Discussing approaches used by certain muds is fine, but please don't turn your posts into adverts.

The are there for a reason.