Thinking about an isometric Open Source RPG

[Aptera]

my ideas are rather strange, as I only got into Video Games recently and missed most of the games that are most similar to my ideas. Which is why Ii'd like you guys to comment and critique it.

For a while now I've been thinking of creating an open source RPG. For a while now I've been playing The Battle of Wesnoth (which you should be playing right now if you haven't) and that really introduced me to the world of Video Game Sprites. Since then I've been quite fond of sprites, not only for aesthetic reasons, but also since anyone can learn to do it, which makes finding contributors and people willing to mod a game, much easier.

in my mind I'd like the game to be a series of linked maps in an isometric style quite similar of that of Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced (http://www.spriters-resource.com/squenix/finalfantasy/ffta/) (a good game, if rather old at this point, and the link takes you to the Spriter's Resource page for it which has an enormous amount of things ripped from that series) which you can travel around (probably by going to a big map or simply clicking on the end of each zone, I'm not sure at this point) and which has monsters and puzzles and NPCs etc.

A major question for me that I need help with involves sprites. I'm probably going to use the sprites from the Battle for Wesnoth, mostly because of their high quality and high number (although it lacks a number of positions I need, like NE-NW and walking) which saves me a lot of trouble and will make the game look a lot more polished. Thats fine for Monsters and other NPCs, but I've run into a wall with the hero (i.e. the player). There are simply not enough sprites, nor will there ever be enough contributors to make enough sprites, to allow the character to be shown using all of the equipment that would normally be expected to show up in any game. I'm not really sure what to do there, but I have a number of ideas:
a)Classes. Do what Final Fantasy did and simply make everyone stuck into one class with one type of sprite per class and all the actions associated with it. Rather limiting, and with it I would probably need to have NPCs that can join your party so you don't end overspecializing.
b)Limit the number of items. Easy, but probably not the best solution game play wise.
c)put all items in classes then animate off that.

Thanks for taking the time to read this (or look at it)!

[Brewdude]

Err, I was under the impression that this was handled via each weapon having it's own sprite that got overlaid onto the hero sprite, and that multiple weapons used the same effects or even sprites!

Basicly, put the effect animation into the weapon sprite rather than the hero sprite, and have only a few basic looks for the hero that depended on the weapon (swinging for melee, different for wands/guns.

[Aptera]

Err, I was under the impression that this was handled via each weapon having it's own sprite that got overlaid onto the hero sprite, and that multiple weapons used the same effects or even sprites!

Basicly, put the effect animation into the weapon sprite rather than the hero sprite, and have only a few basic looks for the hero that depended on the weapon (swinging for melee, different for wands/guns. Thats sounds good. I was wondering if that was possible with sprites.

[InaVegt]

There's an old time honoured trick for this, palette swaps.

Say you have a hero who's supposed to be an elven swords master, pick a sprite from one of the elven sprites and change the colours around, this can easily be done in something like the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).