Classes and skills
Whatever is in your hands is what you are
When you make a character you choose the class you start in, and you arrive with its weapon in your hand. Hold a sword and a shield and you are a knight. Swap them for a dagger and you are a rogue, with the rogue's own level, the rogue's own skills and the rogue's own idea of what armour is for.
You can change back whenever you like. Your knight keeps its level and its skills while you play the rogue, and picking the sword up again puts you back where you left off. The one limit is that you cannot change weapons in the middle of a fight.
Every class
Each one fights its own way, and each has its own skill tree.
Commoner
No weapon and no trade. What everybody starts as, and what you are again the moment your hands are empty.
What empty hands make you
Rogue
Fast, light and close. Fights with a dagger.
Pick up a dagger
Warrior
A two-handed sword, and nothing in the other hand.
Pick up a greatsword
Ranger
A bow, and the distance to use it.
Pick up a bow
Cleric
A wand and a shield, and what the two can put back.
Pick up a wand
Mage
A staff, and what it can throw.
Pick up a staff
Knight
Sword and shield, and the weight to stand still with them.
Pick up a sword
The long version, including what a change of class costs you: Choosing a class .
Skills
Every armed class has a tree of skills to grow into.
Each level brings points to spend in your class's skill tree. Early skills are simple and useful from the first fight. Further up the tree they ask for the ones beneath them and get more interesting: a shield thrown and caught on the way back, a ring of frost around a mage, a barrage of arrows, a heal for whoever is in trouble.
Some skills leave something behind on whatever they hit. Poison keeps working after the blow and armour is no help against it, fire keeps burning, wounds bleed, and a hard enough clout leaves somebody unable to move for a moment. Whatever is on a fighter shows as a row of marks above their health.
Skills go on an action bar you can page through. Drag one there, or select it and press a number. Both work with a thumb.