When you make a character, the client asks you to pick a class. You cannot skip that question — it is drawn by the game client from its own files, and no server can change it.
On Ashmorrow we call the answer your chassis, because that is what it has been reduced to: the frame your character is built on, not the list of things you may do.
What the chassis decides
- Base stats and how they scale. How much attack power you get per point of Strength, how much spell power per point of Intellect, how much mana per point of Spirit.
- Health and armour. A Warrior chassis carries more of both than a Mage chassis, at every level.
- Your resource. Rage, mana, energy, runic power.
- Armour proficiency. Which armour class you can wear without penalty.
What the chassis does not decide
What you can learn. That is the entire point of the realm.
A Mage chassis that has spent its budget on Sword Mastery genuinely swings the sword, with the same ability the "real" warriors use. It will hit for less, because it has a Mage's attack power scaling and a Mage's health to survive getting close enough to use it.
Which brings us to the honest part.
The problem we have not solved
Balance will be dominated by the chassis long before the ability pool matters.
That Mage-with-a-sword is not a fun off-meta build; it is a strictly worse warrior. The abilities are free, but the scaling behind them is not, and the scaling comes from a hidden class that the player was asked to choose before they understood any of this.
There are three ways out, and none of them is free:
- One chassis for everyone. Normalise every class's stat tables to a single neutral profile. The cleanest result — build choice becomes the only thing that differentiates characters — and the largest amount of work. It also erases class flavour entirely.
- The chassis as an honest choice. Keep the frames distinct and tell players what each one is for, so "tough" and "fragile" become a real decision made with real information. Least work, keeps variety, and accepts that some chassis-and-ability combinations will be better than others.
- Correct it at runtime. Apply a hidden aura that normalises stats as you play. Flexible and reversible, and it spends the rest of its life fighting the game's own scaling code.
This is a design decision, not an engineering one, and it is the single biggest open question on the project. It will be settled before the skill-point system ships, because it decides what that system is balancing.
Until then, the armory shows your chassis plainly on every character page rather than hiding it. If it is going to shape your character this much, you should be able to see it.