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Monday, March 14, 2022

Archetypes on my Mind

Character classes perform several functions in D&D. First of all, they provide some information to the players about what the game is about, and what sorts of characters fit in the milieu of the game. The archetypes of characters, in other words. Secondly, they provide game mechanical distinctions and roles for each player to engage in within the game world. They show players that there are trade-offs to be made in the game, as to be good at one thing necessitates being poor in some other area. Third, they facilitate easy (in theory anyway) character creation, as players don't need to micromanage every skill and ability of their PCs. This is a result of the first and second functions, but certain systems that load on carte blanche skill/feat/ability choices on top of a class system may not function this way in practice.

Game design, if we're working in that class-based paradigm, requires an understanding of these functions in order to make the game interesting mechanically as well as thematically interesting. 

In a game of near-future dystopian adventure, classes like Mercenary, Hacker, Driver, Smuggler, Criminal, and Mechanic might make sense. Adventures would likely include fights, computer problems, lots of crime, escapes, and equipment/vehicle repair. They're the archetypes (well, some of them) of the genre. And while there are other archetypes in the fiction we might use as inspiration, something like a tattoo artist or rave DJ doesn't really provide much to work within the likely game mechanics of the system (assuming it's adventure based, rather than social role play based). Your mercenary may well be a rave DJ by night, but that's just extra color, not necessarily something that needs its own character class. 

And no, I'm not about to try and steal JB's thunder by releasing a cyberpunk game while he's taking a break for Lent. Just using that as an example of potential classes in a non-medieval fantasy type game. 

And so, we get to D&D. It has some archetypes from source fiction, of course, but also some that have just sort of become D&Disms over the years. 

OD&D's LBBs had Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User as its archetypes. Well, also the Elf (Fighter and/or Magic-User), Dwarf (Fighter plus dungeoneering skills) and Halfling (Fighter plus a bit of wilderness skill).

But then supplements and later editions added in more archetypes. Thieves and Paladins, Druids and Assassins, Monks, Rangers, Bards, Psionic dudes, Illusionists, Barbarians, Cavaliers, Acrobats, Samurai, Shukenja, Sohei, Kensei, Ninja, Wu Jen, Knights of Solamnia, another simpler Bard, specialist Priests and Mages, Sorcerers, Warlords, Warlocks, Artificers, and on and on and on!

And of course, multiclassing and dual classing rules allow for mixes of the archetypes. 

Most of you know all this already, but I wanted to get it down because what follows stems from this. 

What exactly are the appropriate archetypes for a game to feel like D&D? Is it the bare minimum from OD&D of Cleric/Fighter/Magic-User? Is it those three plus the Thief? Is it Fighter/Thief/Magic-User as a few people have suggested? Just Fighters and Magic-Users, all the rest is fluff?

Or do we need a bit more to get the D&D feel? This is where I wonder what classes are in D&D simply because they're expected to be in D&D. Paladins and Rangers and Druids, for example. Obviously, we can have D&D without them. I grew up mostly playing BECMI, which only allowed druids and paladins/avengers once characters got to 9th level (if you played by the book), and the closest thing to a ranger was the Halfling class with its bonus to ranged attacks and 1-9/d10 ability to hide in the wilderness. 

There's something about the AD&D class set-ups, whether it's 1E with the Assassin and Illusionist, or 2E with its simple Bard class, that just feels right to me, even though most of my early years I played without. And of course for younger players who started with WotC editions, a game without Barbarians and Sorcerers as standard might feel a bit strange. Does the "savage warrior" archetype need to be there, either for fidelity to the source material (i.e. Conan), or because it fulfills a needed game mechanical slot (combat plus wilderness skill)? Or is "savage" just something descriptive to tack on to the Fighter, like a Mercenary rave DJ in my cyberpunk example above?

So, I'd like to run a little informal poll here. In the comments, please tell me: 

1. What are the bare minimum archetypes needed for D&D in your opinion?

2. What are the archetypes that give you the "D&D feel" and should be included beyond the bare minimum, if any? 

3. What archetypes, if any, break that "D&D feel" for you?

4 comments:

  1. This a very personal thing for me: when I started gaming in the 90s, I started on Classic D&D, AD&D 2e, and the Final Fantasy series (the first seven games were out at the time, and it was entries I, III, and V that made strong use of classes).

    For me, "Classic D&D" shares a lot of overlap with "Final Fantasy I," whereas AD&D (with all its sub-classes) feels like the expansive "jobs" system from FF3 and FF5.

    When I gave up playing D&D 3e and rediscovered Classic D&D back in '06 or thereabouts, I pretty much stuck to the options in the RC as written. Because they reminded me so much of FF1. Consider how the two games are set up. FF1 has six classes, each with a promotion —

    Fighter —> Knight (learns white magic spells)
    Thief —> Ninja (learns black magic spells)
    Black Belt —> Karate Master
    (White, Black, Red) Mage —> (White, Black, Red) Wizard

    RC D&D has a fighter who can become a paladin, a thief who eventually becomes a master thief able to read mage scrolls, a mystic monk, a magic-user, a cleric, and druids and elves that are both reminiscent of the red mage. (FF red mages are basically a fighter/white mage/black mage combination, and you have elves which function as fighter/magic-users and druids which are something like cleric/magic-users.)

    I loved the symmetry of that. And for the longest time, I stuck with Classic D&D as my go-to game, without ever adding classes to it if I could avoid it. (Adding an artificer class was the one major exception, because I liked to run games in steampunk settings. Beyond that, if I could justify treating an archetype as just fluff or skills, I did that. A ranger could just be a fighter who was also a woodsman; a bard was just a thief who played a lute; etc.) And that was the way things stayed for me until very recently.

    But I also played AD&D in the late 90s, and there's no ignoring how formative that was for me. If there's any artwork that speaks to me about what these archetypes are more deepy than Terry Dykstra's lineart from the Rules Cyclopedia and especially the Classic D&D Game, it's those soft-focus paintings illustrating Chapter 3 of the black-cover 2e Player's Handbook depicting the grim fighter, the smiling paladin, the goateed thief, the fancy bard, the "triangle man" cleric, the kilted druid, the blue-robed and white-bearded mage, and the illusionist dangling a little hypnotic crystal. DAMN that shit cuts deep.

    So… recently, I felt like I missed all that stuff, and I added sub-classes back to my Classic D&D games, after a fashion. I write more extensively about why on my blog, but the gist is, I wanted to mostly cover these archetypes with classes again rather than with fluff, while also fleshing out some concepts that seemed to need it. Right now, the class system I'm using looks like this:

    • basic classes: Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief
    • specialist and combination classes: Artificer, Monk, Minstrel, Ranger, Psionicist
    • "promotion" classes: Paladin, Bard, Avenger, Diabolist, Druid, Assassin
    • demihuman classes: Elf, Dwarf, Hobbit, Gnome, Orc

    —with each specific class chosen to cover one or more commonly recognized archetypes. For example, I have both a bard and a minstrel class because I want both the "Celtic warrior-poet / druidic knight / battlefield marshall or warlord" archetype to get a class, and the "rakish itinerant pickpocketing entertainer who plays music, casts illusions, and seduces dragons," which is a very different archetype, to get a separate class. The Avenger, being a knight of Chaos, covers the "berserker" archetype, which seems to me (a) fitting and (b) less gross than having a "barbarian" or "savage" character class. And I just plain missed having psionicists in the game (especially for the opportunity that affords to make the monk class the minor user of psionic powers)!

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  2. Off the top of my head: Fighter, Paladin (or Jedi), Ranger (including Barbarian), Priest, Druid (or Shaman), Wizard (including Illusionist), Witch (call it warlock or sorcerer), Psion, Monk, Thief, Bard, Assassin (call it Rogue or whatever), Artificer.

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  3. For the longest time, I was happy with six basic archetypes — fighter, thief, monk, artificer, mage, and cleric — one for each ability score.

    Lately, I've been feeling more nostalgic for AD&D, and so now I have many more playable classes in my campaign, with fifteen archetypes overalll —

    • Fighter
    • Paladin
    • Bard/Marshall/Warlord
    • Avenger/Berserker
    • Cleric
    • Druid
    • Mage
    • Diabolist/Warlock
    • Thief
    • Assassin/Ninja
    • Monk
    • Artificer
    • Psionicist/Sorcerer
    • Minstrel/Rake/Illusionist
    • Ranger/Gish

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  4. Magic, Mayhem, and Mischief are the minimum in my opinion. You need a brawny brute to break things, a clever specialist with stealthy skills, and a lateral-thinking weirdo that can perform exploits on reality. It's extra nice if some of those exploits help party members stay alive, but not necessary.

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