In the most recent issue of Comics & Games Retailer, there’s a news item about Wizards of the Coast’s plan for 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.
Each characters class will have a specific, defined role within an adventuring party, and the designers’ goal was to give each class interesting options for gameplay at every level.
This approach to characters — although I know many of my D&D-loving brethren love it to death — leaves me cold. Although I’ll admit that it may be reading too much that one little sentence, what I hear is this:
“Your cleric will be exactly like all other clerics. He will dispense healing magic and serve as a second-line combatant.” What I hear is, “This game puts you in a pigeonhole.”
What I hate is that that approach to character definition salts a wide swath of the field where a player could otherwise use his imagination, rather than a pre-stocked template, to make his character’s function in the game.
The standard objection runs that Dungeons & Dragons players have all kind of space to use their imagination. For example, you can choose a deity, and select from among dozens of feats (unless you want an effective cleric, that is). In fact, you can go nuts picking out a funny accent for your cleric. Add all the chrome you want!
But the unspoken rule is that you can only do those things as long as you don’t violate your specific, defined role within the adventuring party. As long as you don’t step out of your pigeonhole. You must never develop for your cleric a code of morals that would prevent him from dispensing healing magic or providing second-line combat support.
Maybe I’m reading too much into a throwaway quote; I don’t know. But it pushed my button, so I felt like it was fair to push back.
“Your cleric will be exactly like all other clerics. He will dispense healing magic and serve as a second-line combatant.” What I hear is, “This game puts you in a pigeonhole.”
What I hate is that that approach to character definition salts a wide swath of the field where a player could otherwise use his imagination, rather than a pre-stocked template, to make his character’s function in the game.
The standard objection runs that Dungeons & Dragons players have all kind of space to use their imagination. For example, you can choose a deity, and select from among dozens of feats (unless you want an effective cleric, that is). In fact, you can go nuts picking out a funny accent for your cleric. Add all the chrome you want!
But the unspoken rule is that you can only do those things as long as you don’t violate your specific, defined role within the adventuring party. As long as you don’t step out of your pigeonhole. You must never develop for your cleric a code of morals that would prevent him from dispensing healing magic or providing second-line combat support.
Maybe I’m reading too much into a throwaway quote; I don’t know. But it pushed my button, so I felt like it was fair to push back.
Oh, man, Jeff, do I disagree. Setting aside the notion that dispensing healing magic and being a second-line combatant hardly scratch the surface of the roleplaying options left to you within that kind of niche, let’s focus just on the giant, elephantine qualifier in the room: this is D&D. Even if you hate character classes everywhere else, this is D&D.
More than that, this is post-WoW D&D. This is the D&D for the MMORPG generation. The kids, they want classes. They want roles to fill in adventuring parties and in raids. They want tanks, healers, buffers, and DPS classes so they’ll know what they’re really doing at the table (and so they can qualitatively measure each other’s play, alas). They want the shorthand and the inspiration.
The hope, though — and, please, let’s do hope — is that there’s enough room more personality within those roles to allow for actual, old-school roleplaying. Let’s hope the abilities of these classes are flavorful and inspirational to the point that they can characterize our (forgive me) toons nee characters. Let us hope, in other words, that there’s still an RPG inside the adventure game.
More than that, this is post-WoW D&D. This is the D&D for the MMORPG generation. The kids, they want classes. They want roles to fill in adventuring parties and in raids.
And I hate it. There was probably a time when I didn’t hate it, but these days, I feel like I may be developing an actual homicidal reaction to the idea that bona fide creativity in character creation is best enacted by game designers and doled out in seven different varieties.
Let us hope, in other words, that there’s still an RPG inside the adventure game.
I’m not sure if I hope that anymore or not, honestly. On the one hand, if the adventure game is really what the post-MMORPG kids really want, let them play it, I guess. I mean, the smart marketing move is clearly to build it for them. (Or is it? If they want WoW, why wouldn’t they just play that?) The other-hand hope is that some of them will move on to join me in the camp of games that facilitate the kind of play I prefer, but on the pessimistic days, that hope strikes me as naïve and pointless.
Classes serve one real purpose in RPGs. They give logic to a party and give a reason for the players to choose a variety of roles for their characters to play. This permits each character to shine at its appointed time, at the moment when the game is pitched to the strengths of that character’s class.
Sure, it’s artificial and archaic, but it’s one of the reasons D&D works so well with a medium-sized group of players. The underlying message is that specialization works best, so find what you’re good at (or like to do) and stick with it.
Towards the end of my RPG designing days, I was becoming increasingly convinced that one of the issues with the classes out there in D&D and other games was the amount of toe-stepping the players did to each other. The cleric could cast ‘find trap’, so why even bring a thief, for example. Therefore, my last couple of designs (Spycraft and Spellslinger) made use of ‘core abilities’ you could never gain by multiclassing. You only got them at 1st level. This gave every class something that only it could do, and sometimes this became an important design structure in the game (For example, in Spycraft, snoops pretty much always succeeded when searching for clues. After all, do you really want the party to miss the clues you’ve carefully planted for them to find?)
Anyhow, were I to design another RPG, I would include some form of player abilities and make it so only one player could take each of them in a given campaign. To give a broad example, I might have the Meatshield power which makes that character unkillable except under certain circumstances, or a Master Duelist power that makes the character always win duels against nameless grunts, etc. The idea being to give the player a real sense of “Damn! I’m awesome!” and remind the other players just why they keep him/her around.
Towards the end of my RPG designing days, I was becoming increasingly convinced that one of the issues with the classes out there in D&D and other games was the amount of toe-stepping the players did to each other. The cleric could cast ‘find trap’, so why even bring a thief, for example.
(Please don’t say “the end,” Kevin. I hope you’ll do an RPG again one day.) This sideswipes another fun thing about classes, though — something that makes them useful but not mandatory: They’re easy to appreciate and fun to analyze. As modular components, you can easily compare and contrast them, through arguments with friends or through actual play, playing with them like Legos. They almost inherently create that between-session play that actually makes up so much of RPGs.
The idea being to give the player a real sense of “Damn! I’m awesome!”
I think that’s such an important part of the fun in RPGs, and classes help make sure that each player is going to get some form of that experience.
Which isn’t to say that I’m pro-character-classes all the time. I just don’t think they’re antithetical to the story-game style.
Grant Morrison chaffed against Marvel Comics recent philosophy of making their comics like movies. He felt that now is the time for comics to do what only comics can do — the weird, wild, cosmic stuff Hollywood won’t do. Maybe RPGs could also benefit from doing what tabletop does that computer games can’t do.
Amen, Bill.
Maybe RPGs could also benefit from doing what tabletop does that computer games can’t do.
The evidence for this is in the enthusiasm of the indie movement, I’d say. Although I’d also guess that those games’ lack of widespread commercial success stems from the same place, whether that’s a good, bad, or otherwise thing.
This is nothing new. Having talked to one of the folks that’s been there at the beginning, and having played during the time when said man–“Old Geezer” of RPG.net–wasn’t in the scene, I know that this is nothing new, that’s it’s always been here, and that it is indeed the hotly-demanded norm of the medium- as shown by the continued dominance of D&D and the success of its paradigm in other gaming media.
That said, both the indie community and WOTC are doomed to fail; the indie folks fail because what they’re selling is not what the majority of gamers want and WOTC will fail with D&D 4.0 because what gamers as a whole want is already provided in a far superior form with World of Warcraft. All of the information provided to date shows the influence of that MMORPG in particular, as well as the medium in general, upon 4.0’s design; however well-meant the effort by Mearls & Company, they can’t beat the fact that MMOs–and WOW specifically, which is to MMOs what D&D is to tabletop–produce far superior value for their cost, are far more convenient for adults and children alike, and possess all of the desired social connection desired and necessary for gamers on average. (Tabletop requires getting everyone in the same place at the same time, isn’t guaranteed to be the same ruleset regardless of who’s playing, isn’t persistent across groups, and doesn’t have superior social interaction to a MMO guild with a Ventrillo server.)
If a tabletop gamer isn’t playing at least once every two weeks, he’s not getting his minimum value for the expense it takes–time and money alike–to get a game session going. His MMO counterpart can log on at any time, play for as long as he likes, can play with or without others, and can switch groups as he likes, all for a fraction of what a tabletop gamer spends on TRPGs per year.
There’s a Hell of a lot more at issue than just making explicit what’s been implicit about D&D (and RPGs in general) since 1974; there’s a technological issue at play, and those blased network externalities are actually posing a real threat that can’t be ignored. D&D has real competition, and it comes from a bunch of D&D geeks- Blizzard Entertainment.
I think one of the reasons why the “younger generation” favour adventuring in a class-based archetypical universe is that they really have had little chance to experience any other role-playing paradigm. Even when they transfer to the tabletop medium, they typically still carry this baggage from the computer with them. This shows an emphasis on combat, power-gaming, dungeon-crawl style questing, and not trying anything too innovative, because they are used to a system of role-playing where you can’t do anything strange – the computer won’t let you. It generally takes work to break them from this mode, to actually start thinking of their characters as individuals and not archetypes with different names, and then they start complaining about the traditional D&D style inflexability.
Maybe RPGs could also benefit from doing what tabletop does that computer games can’t do.
I agree wholeheartedly. While I can understand the compulsion to adjust pen-and-paper syntax to reflect MMO convention, I don’t like it – because I think the practice steers pen-and-paper games away from their unique strengths.
So, Jeff, if one allows that in a table-top game a certain amount of structure in the ruleset that actively prevents player toe-stepping isn’t a bad thing (and I hold up Decipher’s LOTR engine as an example of a game that doesn’t, and suffers as a result), would you say that character classes are always a bad way to do it, or is 4th Ed. just the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction?
We can build interesting relationships between different types of media and see them in action when we look at (for example) the types of comics that have gone cinematic. The Authority took the blockbuster method and extended it in ways that are difficult for mainstream film to accomplish, both in basic story (the studio system makes it impossible for Apollo and the Midnighter to exist without being “sanitized” for the sake of marketability) and visuals (there’s the “billion dollar budget” provided by comic art).
We’ve seen this effect in fantasy literature due to the tremendous influence of D&D (and not just Tolkien) on novels from the 80s onward. This hasn’t always been a good thing but it’s been there, and even resistance to the entrenched concepts has produced work that might not have existed without that resistance.
Now we have a situation where the MMO’s influence is probably unstoppable and we cannot help but enter into a relationship with its conventions when we design and play. The question is whether or not we can get neat new ideas from this or it will simply be a matter of either appealing to MMO players or simply being reactionary. Which will 4e do? Not sure.
Will Hindmarch wrote: “More than that, this is post-WoW D&D. This is the D&D for the MMORPG generation”
This seems to me such an important reason behind WotCs business strategy with DnD 4.0 and other projects, that I’m surprised I haven’t heard more about it.
It seems to me that WotC has realized that the true competition for DnD is not HERO or GURPS or Castles and Crusades or Runequest or Tunnels and Trolls, or whatever, but rather all of the MMORPGs out there. Sure, there will always be grognards like me out there that hate videogames (mostly cuz I sux at them), and prefer pen-paper-and-dice RPGs. But I think that the number of folks like me is relatively small compared to the huge number of people playing MMORPGs.
Those are the folks that WotC has to convince that paper-pens-and-dice DnD is worth coming to or coming back to, after the bright lights of the big city.
I think it comes down to whether you want a passive or creative game experience.
I have always thought that there were two types of table top gamers. There are those who want to be entertained and there are those that want to entertain themselves and the other people around the table. I think a majority of people want a passive experience. They want to be told a story and react accordingly within predetermined rules.
Video games do a great job of that especially WOW. The social aspect is fun but once you learn how to play your class it is the same thing over and over again with slight variations. While it could be argued that table top games can behave the same way they are much more dynamic. Even with Ventrillo you can’t really have a creative game experience in WOW. Even if you play on a role-playing server in WOW you are constrained by the fact that the format of the game itself is limited for that type of play.
I bet that D&D 4th Edition will allow you to play either way. The people playing the game define those things not the rule set. In fact I would argue that even if 4th Ed D&D is as heavily structured as the snippet that started this post indicates that you could still create unique characters despite everything the rules do to cramp your style.
The majority of people will want the rule intensive game experience that D&D offers hence its popularity.
The problem here may be more of a cultural issue then a play issue. In a society that strives for instant gratification WOW would be preferred over any tabletop game due to the lack of effort needed to participate.
Heroquest had 4 classes. Everyone did there thing and miniature guys were moved around on one inch squares in predefined maps.
Is that roleplaying? What seperates roleplaying from playing any game?
The intrinsic paradox is that the over-codification of party “roles” and limited possible outcomes is the end result of one thing.
Bad game masters.
While I understand class role is a trope of the iconic game design… that doesn’t mean it has to be rigidly enforced like a Soviet-era East German border guard either.
The continuing limitation of the game down to a finer granular structure basically assumes that GMing is completely lost; and that one size fits all truly is one size fits all.
Every game, regardless of it’s structure, is only as good as the people running it. And the less you allow options for those running it… the worse it will be. Guaranteed.
Predefined monster roles are in this vein… what if I want a pack of feral Max Shrek Nosferatu vampires running around? Oops. WOTC determined all vampires are masterminds, and BUILT THE GAME BALANCE around this determination so that it is difficult to change.
The primary rule of all game design should be that decisions should be in the hands of the players… this goes in direct opposition to that. Period.
And if you don’t believe players are smart enough or good enough to play your game, and you have to spell everything out for them? You got bigger problems. Much bigger problems.
D&D allows one to play a large variety of combat-capable adventurers. It is based on challenge paradigm; that is, large part of satisfaction of play comes from defeating challenges, especially of martial nature. For that style of play classes do make sense, IMO. Games should always be criticised on their home turf. There’s little point in saying the My Life with Master is not a good dungeoncrawling game.
I’ve been playing RPGs since the mid 70s, and I can tell you that there have ALWAYS been “roles” for characters in D&D. They’re called classes. By definition, the fighter was the guy that could take the damage and was good at melee. He had armor, d10 hit points, a big attack bonus, and several melee attacks per round. The wizard was good at blasting stuff and was super squishy – he could dish out 10d6 damage to everyone in a huge area, but only had d4 hit points and at higher levels just had no hope of ever hitting anything in melee. What the quote refers to is the consciousness on the part of the designers to have the classes not step on each others toes. It was always annoying that spell casters (especially clerics) could always end up dishing out more damage, take more damage, and offer more utility than any fighter or rogue – even as late as 3rd edition. And they were the only ones that could heal on top of it. By designing to roles, it is easier to ensure that one class doesn’t get to “do it all” without a cost. You can still have characters that cross roles by taking feats outside your normal abilities or by multi-classing.
4th edition looks like it’s actually going a long way to making much more flexible characters. Hit points, AC, saves, and attack bonuses are all based on character level, not class level. This makes multi-classing much easier and gives all characters a similar baseline. This doesn’t make them more alike, it frees up people to make them more different. For example, previously, if I wanted a fighter mage, I suffered an hp penalty when taking mage levels that made me squishy, I couldn’t effectively wear armor making melee even more dangerous, and my spells were weak as I couldn’t reach high caster levels or higher level spells. Under the new system the baseline is higher and the discrepancies are smaller. A mage that takes armor and weapon feats can function in combat now because their base attack bonus isn’t dirt compared to their fighter counter part. They won’t have as many combat options, but will still be effective in the ones they have. This allows for a much greater freedom of choice than characters have had before, not less.
WoW is not a substitute for gaming. I play WoW and love WoW, but it is a far cry from gaming. The storytelling, for one thing, is really absent. In WoW, it’s window dressing. In gaming (at least the way I play), it’s intrinsic. Also, I don’t have be constantly pulled from immersion by immature players whining or constant streams of letters that are supposed to mean something. kk?
I think it’s also very easy to write off character classes as a crutch or something novices need or desire to get into role-playing. Personally, I find that it’s simply a different type of game. I’ve played my share of games with classes and with generic creation guidelines, and they’re just different gaming experiences. Sometimes I like the more “human” characters that have an organic feel to their abilities and sometimes I like playing classes with specific (though slightly modifiable) abilities. I don’t like to spend all my time in either type of game. Too long in the character class realm and I can feel hemmed in. Too long in the organic creation realm and I can feel directionless.
Knowing what you’re supposed to be doing can allow you the comfort to reach into other aspects of your character where you might otherwise spend your time trying to figure out how on earth you’re going to solve the kingdom’s problems with a pacifist warrior, a healer that won’t heal, and a rogue that feels guilty if he ever does anything nefarious.
It’s all good.
-Kevin
Great point from Malcolm Sheppard in “The question is whether or not we can get neat new ideas from this or it will simply be a matter of either appealing to MMO players or simply being reactionary.”
The value of the MMO type of game should be taken for what it is in terms of gaming and what it does well and what people like about that. And given D&D was a major inspiration on those MMORPGs, it makes sense to me that it should look back to where those have gone.
I really don’t agree that WoW/MMORPGs are necessarily taking from the tabletop RPG players, in fact I’m positive that there are many RPGers like myself who simply don’t enjoy MMORPGs and who in any case, even if they do like them, find them not to be a substitute at all. However, I grant a portion of tabletop RPGers would really prefer an MMORPG either upon exposure or if MMORPGs were much richer/more versatile, even if they lacked any of the specific around-the-table narrative and give-and-take that defines the mixture of storytelling, roleplaying, and gaming. And for those people, good deal for them, and no reason they should be playing old-fashioned RPGs as that’s not really the thing they’re after.
I’d like to point out that the notion that “tabletop” RPGs require getting everyone around the table is not only incorrect but is also a rut we ought to be thinking around/over/”outside the box.” I mean no offense to the person who posted that, and it is a way many of us look at it – including in a way myself since I’ve not been satisfied with PBEM/PBP/other asynchronous methods. My point though is that we should be thinking of how tabletop RPGing can be performed in so many ways, with the aid of technology, and even more to how to merge what does work with MMORPGing and RPGing alike, including avatar-style presences digitally, for example. Much in the same way we should look to how other games accomplish the “game” and social aspects we’re interested in, we also should be challenging some of the material concepts we’ve grown with. Online technology is definitely the friend, not the enemy. We’ve made extensive use of just the rudimentary stuff to enable remote communications. Even at that, the tools out there are lacking. So we have a lot to do and a lot of opportunities in this regard.
Similarly, we can teach a lot to MMORPGs, some of it has obviously been done, but there’s more to learn along the way, I’m sure.
Back to the classes point, first let me give the caveat I’ve never been a D&D fan, even though it is the first RPG I played. That said, I’ve always considered the class concept as core to the game and part of the game specifically because it is intended to provide not only balance but “a specific, defined role within an adventuring party, and the designers’ goal was to give each class interesting options for gameplay at every level.” This mission statement strikes me as their roots, part of the very raison d’etre of the system, and something which, from what I’ve heard, has waxed and waned in fulfillment over the years. Anyway, to me the point of classes was to assure a specific party-relevant role (with the class naming providing an intuitive grasp for players), and in providing balance I believe that applies to “fun” as well as “game.”
As we’re at the end of publishing official licensed D&D product (Dragonlance) and are watching the horizon for Fourth Edition. One of my colleagues built his career on 3e and is now really anxious, so he follows all the news and reports it as it hits the ‘Net.
As a D&D player for twenty years, I’m also left with really mixed feelings about the Fourth Edition information. It really does start to feel like the rules are a direct reaction to World of Warcraft. And to me that’s a real shame — because WoW tries to replicate some of the D&D experience in an online environment. Making an RPG that plays like WoW feels like making a copy of a copy.
I read some bits of various designer blogs to a friend who is an online gamer and D&D fan. His reaction? “I’ll just play WoW.”
Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’m just not finding much to be excited about in the new edition. Could be the actual release changes my mind, but the hype doesn’t do a thing for me so far.
So, Jeff, if one allows that in a table-top game a certain amount of structure in the ruleset that actively prevents player toe-stepping isn’t a bad thing (and I hold up Decipher’s LOTR engine as an example of a game that doesn’t, and suffers as a result), would you say that character classes are always a bad way to do it, or is 4th Ed. just the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction?
I guess I wouldn’t take the categorical stance that character classes are always a bad way to prevent unsatisfying overlap among character abilities.
But this might be a better approach, and easier, and more satisfying, and it is rarely even explicitly suggested in game rules: Players should talk to each other before and during the process of character creation, and if they want to reserve tactical, magical, narrative, or personality space for their character and their character alone, they can just ask politely. This has the benefit of also addressing the complications that Kevin talks about, above (that is, that there’s too much overlap between classes in 3.5 as it currently stands).
Obviously, it’s hard to say anything concrete about 4th Ed. at this point; my suspicion is that it’s the pendulum swinging too far, yes.
I’m not convinced that the Decipher LOTR system (it had a name at one point… the Icon System? who knows…) suffers from lack of structured class differentiation. Or, at least, there’s much richer ground for blame in the fact that the game wasn’t playtested prior to its release than in the design approach.
It was the Coda System, Jeff. I still quite like it.