My Class is Bugged - Glitch to Another World

"Loading, Loading"

The loading bar reached its end. I never thought it would be this fast. This is not a state-of-the-art 3D game, I reminded myself. It was my friend Lia’s indie game, a simple tabletop game behind a neatly drawn loading screen showing an asian style palace stuffed into the giant walls of a european castle. Judging from the star shaped layout of the outer walls, it could have even been a canon proof citadel from the renaissance or early industrial era.

Lia told me there would be canons in this game, so it makes sense. She was still undecided about gunpowder in general, but she firmly believed that there could not be no canons on ships in a fantasy setting.

I pressed the [new character] button. The image zoomed in on a small hut in the castle; fully empty except for the two grey silhouettes standing there. A line of text appeared above them.

“Are you male or female?”

Moving the pointer to the left, I picked male.

“Now, please select a species. Note: You cannot change it later.”

I knew this wasn’t quite correct. There was simply no way to respec. If you chose to play as an orc, but you’d rather switch to being an elf later, the best thing to do was to restart with a new character. Some magic scrolls and potions which could do the job existed, but they were so rare that by the time you found one, you could have started anew twice already.

Because it was a 2D game with cheap graphics, development focused elsewhere, which lead to there being plenty of character options to choose from. And because the game relied on an AI system made inhouse by a guy named Sarran, minor adjustments could be made by the player. Take, for example, the [beast folk] option, which had plenty of subspecies. If you didn’t want to be a [werewolf], you could just change it to [weredog] and it would work just as intended. Truth be told, the AI was actually kind of crappy. Change it to something like [werebunny] and the system was likely to misunderstand (by the way, I wasn’t going to play a beast man).

Something told me that people may use this to their advantage, testing how far they could go before turning into something completely inhuman.

I, for my part, picked [human]. A boring choice. Or rather, it would be if not for my class.

“All that is left to decide is to pick a class.”

There was a proud roster of twenty of them, sorted into categories by their respective primary role, ranging from [tank] to [damage dealer], over [healer] to [utility] and even [reconnaissance].

I could also click a button to change the arrangement, so that all the classes were shown without the role they fulfilled in a party.

Among them was the [spirit ranger], a class that Lia preferred to play in our testing sessions. Equipped with a bow and exploration skills, it was a [reconnaissance] class first and a [damage dealer] second. It had a signature ability called [tender of the spirit of plants], which allowed Lia to see spirits and interact with them, even though it was limited to flora. It was her idea that the plants of her world should have spirits, and I created the class to emphasize this aspect.

Another one was the [oracle]. I didn’t create it, Sarran did. He insisted that he was the only one suited for this task. This went so far that when I showed him the oracle from a tabletop game I played when I was in university, he said that it was “respectless”. We deemed it likely that one of his parents or grandparents was an esoteric. Sarran’s [oracle] had something to do with communion with otherworldly beings.

I clicked the button again and back was the list of roles.

None of them got my attention. None but one. I clicked the button [rescuer] and went down the entries to my dream come true. Rocking up and down like a child on my chair, I felt the excitement of also being able to be the first to playtest it.

"You picked [bloodline enigma]. Good choice." Yes, it said this for all classes. "The [bloodline enigma] is a special class in that it requires you to choose three abilities, each linked to a powerful creature or being of myth."

The idea behind this was that from a roleplaying point of view, the characters couldn't decide on their legacy. We wanted to urge the players to discover their legacy and feel a deeper bond with the world as they explored it, feeling more immersed and connected to the NPC population living within.

The other classes and some species had something similar. Sarran, as an [oracle] could, for example, discover that he was blessed by a god or a magic prodigy, while Lia’s [spirit ranger] could have been raised by treants, trained by wood elves, or simply be mutated.

While some of us feared that people would rely on trading their characters, Lia solved the problem by offering a simple solution: Limiting the number of new characters you could create to one per month, with lenience to new players of course.

I wasn't going to know my exact legacy until much later. The only thing left was to check that I chose the correct abilities:

"[Reality shift] Allows changing one metaphysical aspect of reality, like inversing the meaning of curse effects or changing someone’s dimension from material to spiritual, giving them a ghost’s properties.

[Perpetual renewal] Should you die, a crystal holding your soul is formed, from which you spring back to life with your body reformed seven days later.

[Inner light] You control golden fire which can be used as a convenient torch or for healing your allies. It harms undead if brought into contact."

Anything else, like spells, attack moves and passives, were going to be determined semi random later in the game in the form of a couple of options to choose from per level up. As this was a 2D game with limited budget, appearance was a matter of nothing more than static character portraits.

I put on my headset and called Lia. She was probably already annoyed by how long it took me to create a character for a simple test session. To my defense, there was a good reason for this: Character creation is not just part of the game, it is the best one, a sophisticated experience you need to enjoy!

We received a quest which consisted of retrieving a legendary artifact from another dimension. In the game, Lia went by the name Elana, while I was still called Tharamir. To get to the other dimension, I shared an idea with her.

“So, you’re going to use this?”

“Yes”, I answered and adjusted my headset.

She was still skeptical about it, it seemed. “Really sure about it?”

When I told her again, I was sure I could hear the microphone filtered sound of her planting a facepalm on her head. “You shouldn’t do this.”

“Why not?”

“Just a gut feeling.”

“Uhm, okay.”

We were currently playing around with Sarran’s AI, testing its limits. It’s mostly nothing more than a bot translating our input to the numbers measuring our characters actions and their impact on the digital world. Messing around with it was surprisingly funny.

So, whatever her concern was about, she didn’t need to be worried. My character was made for this. I continued by announcing what I was going to do by typing my action into the prompt field:

"Activating [reality adjustment] to change the plane of existence of [Tharamir] and [Elana] to [Mieren]."

Just as in games where you could hover the pointer over an ability to get an explanation, the prompt field promptly generated an info tag:

"([reality adjustment] allows the user to change an aspect of reality anyway he or she pleases at the cost of his or her own life or a sacrifice of a similar magnitude.) "

Huh, ‘anyway he or she pleases’ is new.

“You idiot. I even told you it’s a bad idea”, she proclaimed, “You mistyped it. It’s called Miren, not Mieren. There is no Mieren in my game. How is the system supposed to know what you mean? Also, we should have just used the console to get there.” She had the heart of a cheater. “May have to restart…”

Her last words sounded muffled.