Just an idea:
How about letting the player earn classes, perks and mali?
That way, you enhance the replay factor mightily.
here is how I would handle it.
I would say, the skill gain could be taken from Call of cthulu. You start out with a certain percentage in each skill, based on your attributes, and can increase it, but you never sink under what you can do with your attributes.
Thus, lets say, if the average joe MC player starts fresh, he would have strength 10, dexterity 10, constitution 10, and athleticism , which is (strength + dexterity + constitution/3) 10.
Now, I would say, as an example, he wants to train for the perk "athletic" ( gives the char a bonus to athletic actions).
He goes to the selection window, selects train for "athletic", and then just enjoys. This way, his athleticism will not lower, because he actively trains for it.
On the mechanical side, athleticism is added to his to train skills. Thus, if he does something that would let him use athletics ( lets say, help with deliveries), every time he does that, he gets a possibility to raise that.
It could ( remember, I am only a writer, so all I spoew is possibilities) work like this:
Roll 1 d 100, and if you get over your current number, you get +0.1 to that skill.
Now, the same could be used to train for a feat. Athletics, for example, could say , every 5 trainings of athleticism, while having the skill over 25, roill 1d100 and try to come over ( traitvalue). If you do, you get the trait / feat/wossname.
Now, classes I would definie as allmost jobs, so you can use the same mechanics on girls.
Each class has a prequisite, so you can have player only classes ( lets say, baseball fan), and you can have Girls only classes ( pig-pet), just by allowing the class to check for the prequisite IsPlayer or IsGirl
Now, on to greener pastures.
I would ammend the classes with one variable, Time served as, that I would add as an incremental, invisible trait. Just so you can check for this, and go, ok, if you worked for a year as a guard, you can join the military.
If you now want to train for a class, select the class from the droip down menu that shows you all the classes you qualify for with your current stats.
If your class is not there, train more.
Now, as sooin as you select a class, you begin to train for this class. The required skills, attributes, and so forth are added to your "to train list", and you can now train the required skills a bit fater, and they do not degrade. Each other skill, that is not part of the class, can degrade, and is trainable a bit slower.
The rate of degradation / bonus training I would set in relevance to the number of skills that get trained at the same time. So, lets say you are training for the perk, athleticism and want to train as a guardsman.
Guardsman adds strength,m dexterity, coinstitution, intelligence, melee and paperwork to the to train list, athleticism adds athletics. seven things to train at the same time, should only be fair if you level up the individual skills slower then if you had a class that only added, lets say, strength.
I would say, for X skills, each skill progresses at (1/x) times the speed, seems fair. So, if you use the skill athletics, because you are still helping carry the mail in your offtime, the skill would train every 7 times you trained the skill. Of course, there is also the handy option to just do the CLASS JOB, which automatically trains all associated skills every time you do it.
benefits:
- open ended. If a class is defined as a collection of skills, that have to be at various levels before you can enter ( and maybe a few feats), creating new classes is easy and can be done in a pinch.
- girls and the MC can use the same system.
- checking the prequisites allows you to call the same class different things. For a male, it would be escort, just as for the woman, but you could also implement that the class buttler, if selected for a girl, is called maid.
- many funs.
drawbacks:
- most likely lots of work
- definition problems.
- classes would have to be added via packs. not neccesarily a bad idea, but could be worked.
