D&D General Ditching Archetypes 6E?

[EzekielRaiden]

Two words. Party interdependence.

Assuming the default style of play to be a group of characters going out on adventures (an assumption that doesn't seem too controversial) then doesn't it make sense to design in such a way as to encourage and support that style?

If each character is good at a quarter of the things they can do, then put four of 'em together in the right combination and between them they're good at everything.

That, and I'm quite fine with bigger parties than just four even if there's just four players.

But that isn't the only way to create party interdependence. 4e was--by far--the best edition yet made for actually inducing party interdependence, and it had many things you reject, while avoiding many things you claim are necessary.

So, again, we're left with something that doesn't actually seem to make a difference: a past edition of D&D successfully achieved the goal you seek without applying the harsh restrictions you're claiming are required.

"Most of the people most of the time" still isn't "everyone all the time", which seems to be what some want.

I mean, I think there are three components here.

1: Everyone should actually be getting to participate in some kind of meaningful way at...pretty much all occasions. "Meaningful" doesn't mean "powerful", but it does mean that having you there is contributing as opposed to being an irrelevant lump or an active hindrance. (Note, active hindrance; it's fine if attempted things fail and thus create hindrances, it's not fine if your primary "contribution" is to make things worse in most cases.)

That said, IME even when a character is mechanically inept in a situation (e.g. an Illusionist in a party facing a bunch of illusion-immune undead) its player still finds ways to participate in-character and have the character do things.

And IME, when you force players into ineptitude in most cases, they just get very frustrated. Yes, in a minority of cases, they'll genuinely find something clever and creative to help contribute, but in the majority, either their creativity is simply not up to such a daunting task, or no amount of creativity could ever be up to such a task. Either one makes the player feel like, at best, a mere booster, and at worst useless or even an active hindrance to their friends.

This is a leisure-time activity. Folks shouldn't be sitting around waiting for the few moments where they get to contribute, nor should it be Olympic hurdle-jumping for them to even find ways to contribute. But, again, meaningful contribution is not the same as power--it just means you are, in some observable way, able to really help, up to the limit of randomness and player skill.

Terminology issue, my bad. When I say combat I usually default to melee; and a wizard who wants to start dropping artillery into melee combats won't be around for long once the survivors among his allies get to him.

Further, artillery can also be useful against structures. Foes hiding in a wooden building? Fireball it, and see how long they stay in there.

It's still dilution, something you have otherwise been utterly adamant about except in this one case...with the one class that is the most susceptible to usurping others' roles. Do you not see how your absolute "NO healers except Cleric" stance clashes with your "Oh, Wizards can be artillery too, that's fine" stance?

It's also a question of defining each class' niche. If for example divination spells could be entirely removed from arcane casters and given to divine casters, they then become part of the divine-casters' niche. If charm-dominate effects could be removed from generic wizards and given solely to Illusionists, they become part of the Illusionsts' niche. Lather rinse repeat until generic wizards are left with artillery and spot damage, buffs (e.g. Fly, Invisibility, etc.), and some oddball stuff like Identify at one end and Wish at the other. And artillery becomes their niche; as such, Clerics lose spells like Flamestrike, Call Lightning, etc.

Even with that, niche protection will never be perfect. But here, perfect is the enemy of good enough, and it can still be made a lot stronger than it is right now.

The question is not whether it can be stronger, let alone perfect. The question is why this level of hyper-restriction is required in order to achieve your stated goal of party interdependence. Again, 4e had extremely high party interdependence, despite characters being hardier than 3e or 5e at low levels.* Yet 4e included Swordmage, a class with magical and combat abilities. It included Shaman, a class that could heal like Clerics can. If this is so, what reason forces us to choose such incredibly strident hyper-limited classes--where characters will be frequently left with little to nothing to contribute beyond some well-spoken roleplay--in order to achieve the stated goal of party interdependence? We have examples that seem to show otherwise, so what's going on?

*Believe it or not, because of the +Con bonus, 5e characters can easily overtake their 4e counterparts. I have done the math but it's longwinded, so TL;DR: at merely decent Con (+2 to +3), 4e characters get overtaken by their 5e equivalents relatively quickly, and only pull ahead again because 5e stops at level 20. At 5e's maximum Con (+5 modifier), 5e characters eventually always exceed their 4e counterparts--sometimes substantially, like by 15% or more. But this is off-topic.

 

[Remathilis]

Two words. Party interdependence.

Assuming the default style of play to be a group of characters going out on adventures (an assumption that doesn't seem too controversial) then doesn't it make sense to design in such a way as to encourage and support that style?

The issue comes up when the entire adventure (or even campaign) focuses on specific types of adventures. Adventures with little or no combat are boring to the fighter who can only attack things. An adventure without dungeons gets pretty boring for the thief. An all urban campaign isn't a good fit for a ranger. You plan a heist adventure and the everyone but the thief and maybe illusionist can call it an early night.

I don't want equal proficiency in all tasks, but I do want to have some relevance in most adventures. I especially don't want roles to straightjacket me into only certain types of adventures that I can play in or run.

If each character is good at a quarter of the things they can do, then put four of 'em together in the right combination and between them they're good at everything.

That, and I'm quite fine with bigger parties than just four even if there's just four players.

You have a problem with players having familiars but you want them to run multiple PCs?

I mean, sure, I guess you can do that. Assuming you want to use D&D Basic's action economy (1 move, one action. No reactions, bonus actions, multiple attacks, only 1 spell per round, no summons or minions, little or no class features). I mean, I guess I'm going to be less bored if I'm playing Bob the Fighter for combat, Cindy the cleric to heal, and Lefty the thief for sneaking, but I could just, ya know, play one character and have a little extra skill use and self healing instead.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

1: Everyone should actually be getting to participate in some kind of meaningful way at...pretty much all occasions. "Meaningful" doesn't mean "powerful", but it does mean that having you there is contributing as opposed to being an irrelevant lump or an active hindrance. (Note, active hindrance; it's fine if attempted things fail and thus create hindrances, it's not fine if your primary "contribution" is to make things worse in most cases.)

...where are the other two points?

 

[Scribe]

Rough math tells me that's between 52 and 78 possible class-subclass combinations, each one needing its own rules and write-up and each one then needing to be vaguely balanced against each other both before and after the corollary variable of PC species is introduced.

Have fun with that.

I'd start - and stop - with 15-20 hard-coded and easily-identifyable classes. No subclasses. Each of those classes has clear strengths in some things and obvious weaknesses in others, with limited bleed-over and hard niche protection. Bang - there's the archetypes.

The thing we'd have to accept is that there's a few archetypes that just don't play well with a game built around party interdependence, the most obvious (and, sadly, most popular) of which are the "I can do everything" archetype and the "I'm the boss" archetype. So, those get punted.

My class list might look something like:

Warriors:
--- Knight (shiny armour, etc.)
--- Swashbuckler (light-armoured, ranged or melee)
--- Veteran (basic mercenary type)
--- Ranger (woods warriors, non-casters, no animal companion)
Rogues:
--- Thief (basic sneaky-scouty type)
--- Assassin (hired killer or spy)
--- Charmer (talky persuasive type)
--- Dancer (genericized wire-fu type, replaces Monk)
Casters:
--- Cleric (divine caster as usual)
--- Nature Cleric (a.k.a. Druid, covers Shaman as well)
--- War Cleric (covers Paladin also)
--- Diviner (divnination spells etc. mostly go here)
--- Illusionist (mind-screwers, charmers)
--- Necromancer (they make things dead then play with the corpses)
--- Summoner (summoning, gating, conjuring spells and familiars/animal companions exclusively go here)
--- Mage (artillerists and buffers)
Oddballs:
--- Psionicist (if it can be made to fit without hosing Illusionists' screw-with-your-mind niche, debatable)
--- Tactician (maybe best as a non-adventuring class?)
--- Artificer (or Tinkerer; specifically for games/settings that have lots of devices and tech)

What's intentionally missing?
--- Swordmage - the classic "I wanna do it all" class - gone in any form.
--- Bard - can't make it fit between Charmer and Illusionist - gone.
--- Warlord or Leader - classic "I'm the boss" class, also healing is strictly Clerical.
--- Barbarian - can't make it fit between the other Warrior classes except as a very boring one-trick pony - gone.
--- Multi-classing - gone.

But...we need foppish magic dabbling characters as comic relief!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

...where are the other two points?

My apologies. I got about three hours of sleep last night and just...completely forgot to write the others.

2: While your (Lanefan's) math adds up--"each person is good at 1/4 of things, therefore to be good overall you need four or more people"--it doesn't actually equate to effective gameplay in practice. Because what that actually means is, "Only one person will actually be playing at any given time, everyone else gets to be that person's cheerleaders." We already know, from other systems, that this kind of design is pretty bad and leads to serious frustrations. Or, if you prefer: why would you sign up for an hour of fun, chunked up into a dozen five-minute increments sprinkled over four hours of play, when you could sign up for four hours of fun? It's incredibly inefficient to design this way. Instead, it is better to design for, "At any given moment, you can contribute 1/4 part of the goals typically sought by the party. Sometimes it will be less than 1/4, sometimes it will be more than 1/4. You'll still need other players."

More or less, this is saying "you get to have fun for 4 hours doing 1/4th of the work needed to reach each goal", rather than "you get to have fun for 1 hour out of 4 doing all of the work needed to reach one specific kind of goal". This is what 4e did with its roles in combat situations. (I freely admit it would have been wise to consider non-combat roles as well.) The player is thus engaged all the time, but flying solo, they couldn't even achieve the theoretical 1/4th of the amount of stuff the group as a whole can do, because chance, time constraints, and action economy prevent one person from being able to do enough to even finish one hour's worth of work for the party of 4. (Some tasks, you really can just use one worker and produce it 1/4 as fast as you would with 4. Some, you simply cannot accomplish with less than 4--e.g. holding up a loop of rope by its corners can't be done with just one person!)

3: "Most of the people most of the time" really actually is what most mean. This is both because most people recognize that sometimes the stars align against you, and because they recognize that flexibility in character creation usually means being able to choose to do slightly fewer things very well, or some things pretty well, or several things only fairly decently. In other words, nobody is demanding the perfection you assert. We recognize that it is a spectrum and that that is okay.