Orthoganal

There are a ton of blogs out there, as I’m sure everyone is aware, but one of my personal favorites is the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog written by a number of law professors about legal issues, bears, song lyrics, and a variety of political topics.

Recently, in an argument made by the Supreme Court, an advocate used the word “orthogonal” to describe an issue that was independent of or irrelevant to the issue being decided before the court.

I haven’t heard the term used outside of engineering (where it means at a right angle to) or mathematics (where it means independent variables), so while I understood the point being made, it sounded strange to me.  Races and classes (and in my case, Religions) can be thought of as orthogonal issues in a mud, something that helps in understanding how the elements interact.

More after the jump.

In the system I have set up, race, class, and religions are orthogonal variables, that is any player’s decision on one variable does not affect his choices on other variables, at least, does not constrain him.  There may be reasons that a player wouldn’t want to play a halfling warrior worshipping the god of mages, but the option is there if he’s interested in it.

The system described can be imagined as a three-dimensional X-Y-Z space, where the axes define race, class, and religion.  Some of these combinations are optimal, others are less optimal alternatives, and others are just bad idea (like the halfling warrior mage-worshipper).

However, it is important to give players choices, so while a halfling warrior may not be the best, players should have a good choice between two (or preferably three) classes for each race.  Mapping race and class based stats (str, dex, con, int, wis, cha) to specific choices makes these choices visible.

This ultimately goes to the issue of game balance, give players the information to make good choices with a couple of options, and balance those options.  Leave the non-optimal choices out, and if players decide to make poor choices, make them live with it.

Of course, my objective is to give specific religions worthwhile benefits for any class, but there still may be some optimal choices, based on preferred play style.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, so I’m trying to get myself back in the groove.  Hope this is at least reasonably informative.