Skills, Magic, and Combat in Eldren

Eldren does not ask players to pick a class when they create a character. Instead, every character grows through individual skills, and the mix of skills a player invests in becomes that character's identity. This post collects my current thinking on how combat, magic, and the limits that tie them together are supposed to work.

Design status: concept only. None of these systems have been built or tested yet, and the details will change during prototyping.

Why Skills Instead of Classes

Traditional classes make one big decision at the start of the game: warrior, mage, or rogue. Eldren moves that decision into many small ones. A character who fights with a sword trains Swordsmanship; a character who studies fire trains Fire magic. Over months, those choices add up to a character that no class menu could have described.

This approach comes mostly from Ultima Online, whose skill-based character system let players combine abilities such as Magery, Blacksmithing, and Fishing however they liked, and partly from the open-ended progression of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The complete list of planned skills, including gathering and crafting, is on the Eldren Game Design page.

The Planned Combat and Magic Skills

What Should Decide a Fight

Combat in Eldren is still at the whiteboard stage, but I have a working list of the factors that should matter, roughly in this order:

1. Preparation: food, potions, and a full Stamina or Mana pool before entering the dungeon.
2. Skill: the character's trained level in the weapon or school of magic being used.
3. Equipment quality: a well-made common sword can outperform a poorly made rare one.
4. Condition: Health, Hunger, and injuries carried over from earlier fights.
5. Location: deeper dungeon floors and lawless areas raise the stakes, including the risk of meeting hostile players.

Putting preparation first is deliberate. A short check-in spent cooking food or brewing potions should make a later dungeon trip safer, which connects quick visits to longer play sessions.

“Freedom to learn anything is only interesting if you cannot master everything.”
— Eldren design note

Limits That Create Specialists

If any character could master every skill, every character would eventually look the same. Eldren's answer is a set of shared limits:

• Stamina for physical actions such as fighting and gathering
• Mana for spellcasting
• Skill points that cap how much a single character can master
• Time, because training is planned to be gradual rather than instant

These limits are meant to create decisions, not chores. A player can still build a sword-wielding healer, but that character will be better at both roles if the player accepts being weaker at something else, such as Blacksmithing or Fishing. That gap gives fighters, crafters, and gatherers a reason to trade with one another.

Example Builds Being Considered

• Battle cleric: Swordsmanship and Light magic, relying on crafters for armor.
• Dungeon scout: Archery, Air magic, and Hunting, selling pelts and rare materials.
• Ember smith: Fire magic, Blacksmithing, and Mining, rarely visiting the deeper floors.

These are thought experiments for testing whether the skill list supports interesting combinations. They are not planned classes or final archetypes.

Next Steps

On the Eldren development roadmap, early skill progression belongs to the Foundational Prototype phase, and simple combat follows in Playable Core Systems. Before then, I want to decide how skills improve and how Stamina and Mana recover over time. For the bigger picture, read Planning the Core Experience of Eldren, or explore where most fights will happen in Beneath the City: Designing Eldren's Dungeon.