Ok today I made my final decision about skills and spells.

It will work this way:

1. all races can be any class. some are more inclined to be casters than fighter, but they will be able to be good fighters anyway
2. there will be 3 main stats: hit points, mana points and fatigue.
3. there will be 2 main classes type: fighters and casters. Plus some hybrid like druids or skirmishers that can do both.
4. The fighting classes will use fatigue to use special attacks that learn automatically as they level up and that unlock based on skills or attributes. Example there can be a special attack called “Swing Strike” that will require slashing skill >20 and dexterity > 10.
5. The casting classes will have the spells based on their deity. Each deity has a set of different spells based on different aspects. So you will have a wizard dwarf that will be specialized in nuking opponents and create magic item for example. Or a human that can cast protective and self-empowering spells.
6. For the casting classes, they’ll have restrictions based on the skills of a specific school of magic. Example, White Magic (the life magic) will include most healing spells from all the deities. Obviously the class healer will have more initial skills and will have a higher skill cap than any other class for White Magic.

I think this system rulez, because each deity will have his own white/black/red magic and so on, leading to lot of variety in spells. That’s why also I made “only” 3 races in the first episode. Those 3 races generates 6 different subset of spells list, and each spell will be of one of the five schools below:

This way, the classical pure fighting classes like warriors will still have special attacks, based on their race/skills, but won’t be able to cast spells. Hybrid classes like skirmisher and paladins (and probably future ones like bards/rangers) will have both special attacks based on fatigue but also some spells based on their deities.

One thing is sure, will be a mess to program, even with just 3 races! 😀

I did more experiments on the view of the game, I’m happy about the classic first person view, a la Dungeon Master, even if of course the gfx efforts will be more than a simple 2d topdown/isometric view.
Call me nostalgic but I really want to recreate the atmosphere of those old classic, and keeping that visual feeling will be essential.
I’m still thinking about the classes. I want to innovate a bit, but at same time don’t want to push it too hard…since I still need to sell a decent amount to live, I don’t want to revolution the roleplaying genre yet 😉
Anyway you can be assured that you won’t find only similar spells to the classic AD&D spells “magic missile” or “fireball”. I want to make also some original spells, for all the casting classes in the game, which right now are Druid, Wizard, Sorcerer and Healer.
Also I’m thinking about the use of the other attributes like Knowledge, Wisdom and Intelligence for non casting classes, and viceversa. They’ll have some impact for sure, but of course not as the main ones.
Knowledge could influence how many new moves a fighter can learn per level, for example. Still would be hard to find another use also for Wisdom and Intelligence. Also, in this case would mean people could make a fighter with average skills and be better than a big tougher one? sure, intelligence plays an important role in fights, but if a small fighter can overcome a big strong one, is mostly thanks to the quickness, agility, rather than pure intelligence. I think is more the instinct, reflexes that guides a fighter in the frenzy moments of a close range fight…!
Nonetheless I’ll try to find a proper use for all the attribute, for all classes. But fighters will be more influenced from the fighting attributes, and casters will be influenced more from the casting attributes.