If I were you, I would make it so that it's like Soul Eater, not is Soul Eater. As far as I know, they can't do anything about it being inspired by the IP. That said, don't make it Soul "Ate-r" or something nearly identical... cuz that's just a whole new can of worms to get messed up on.

Being inspired by someone elses work to help you get into learning to build your own code base and tools isn't exactly a bad thing. But remember when you're starting out (as implied when you say "for educational purposes") the goal is more about learning and building a code base and tools than having something that you're going to try and sell to someone. Also remember you'll probably want your code base and tools to be useful in future projects which means you'll want to distance yourself from thinking of the characters as "Maka and friends" anyways and instead be thinking of them more as the types of characters that you'll be wanting later in your own original works.

Other than that, you haven't described much. A character creation screen that lets you pick your skills probably isn't a bad plan if you want to give the player skills to choose from. The trick is always making sure that decisions that you make the player take at the beginning of the game have some impact on the experience they have while playing. For example, you probably want to avoid making the player choose between two characters that should be very different but essentially both are doing the exact same things gameplay wise.

Enough has been said already about IP so I won't add anyhting here.

You are quite vague about what you mean by "like D&D 3.0" for your character creation. As There have been 5 versions of D&D (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0) what about D&D 3.0 character creation are you refering to? You stated 3.0 and no D&D in general, so that indicates there was something specific about it that you wanted us to understand about you design (is it just that you are familiar with this version and not any of the others?)

What you ahve described about the cracter creation is that you want to be able to select the type of character class/role the player wants them to be. IF this is all you are meaning, then specifically noting D&D 3.0 tends to be confusing (just say you want class/role selection as part of the character creation process).

So, as this seems to be most likely what you are talking aobut, I will go with this.

Before deciding what classes there are going to be, you have to first decide what classes there needs to be. This will depend on your combat system.

Generally a combat system tends to only be a few "roles" that can really exist in them. Mostly this cvan be broken down into:
- Buffers: these give the party a temporary boost or heal them
- Debuffers: these give the enemy penalties or restrict movemnt enemy attacks
- Tanks: these can take lots of damage but not deal large amount of damage
- DPS (Daamge per Second): these deal lots of damage to a small number (usually 1) of targets but can't take lots of damage
- AOE (Area of Effect): these don't do a lot of damage to an individual, but can deal damage to lots of targets at once

Now, a class can be made up of several roles, but usualy it is a 1 to 1, or they are good at one and are poor at another (and can't do any other). Sometimes a class can perform several roles, but their equipment governs wich one of the roles they are dominent at. Finally there is the Jack of all trades but master of none. These classes are average at all the roles, but they can never reach the capbilities of a dedicated class.

So, even though there are only 5 basic roles, you can combine them in many way to create many different classes.

The more roles a class can fulfill the more indipendent it is. IF you want a game where the player(s) are in charge of a party and ahve to work together, then you want to heavily restrict classes to a single role or one dominent role and one secondary role.

The final thing you can use for creating classes is theaming. So a Mage might be really good at targeting multiple enemies (AOE role) using magic like fireball. But you might also have Demolitionist that uses grenades and explosives (AOE) to blow up enemies.

So both are AOE, but the differ in their themeing. Mechanically they might otherwise be identical.

Somtimes this can be enough for a player, especially if theya re a role player as the theme is important to these kinds of players. But a player that is more interested in the mechanics of the game might feel cheated by you doing this too much.

Quote:Just to let you know, there are computer programs for creating D&D characters and printing out the character sheets. My idea was to use a similar setup for the creation of the character, but instead of printing out the character sheet, the program saves the data to a file for access by the game program.

All you are describing here is that the game remembers the choices you make when you design a character. As far as an RPG type game goes, this would be considdered a nessesity and almost goes without saying (but you wo0uld need to state that you save the character to disk in the design document just to make it clear that this is what you intended to do - but you could probably even get away without doing that even).