D&D 5E Heroic Archetypes and Gaps in Class coverage

[Tales and Chronicles]

Also perennially absent form RPGs in general, and D&D in particular, is The Reluctant Hero. (Seriously, folks, one of the most prevalent heroic tropes in genre.)

I created a class for another game called the Bearer, based lousely on the role of Sam or Frodo from LotR. Its a class that gain (growing) powers from an artefact, cause or prophecy called Burden. It acted mechanicaly like a catalyst for the party giving passive bonus to the party and had abilities for self-survival based on the party actions like: when you drop to 0 hp, everyone in the party makes a Willpower(Faith) check, the result on a specific die restore that much ''health'' to the Bearer. 1/day.

It made for a very cool out-of-combat class while benefiting the whole party. If your familiar with 4e, think of a out-of-combat Ardent.
I think this would be an interesting class for the ''reluctant hero'' trope in 5e.

 

[Celebrim]

I agree that Character Classes in D&D are Fantasy Archetypes, not professions or jobs, and that there needs to be more to them than mechanical combinations. However, I would also posit that "the hero that poisons part of himself for a greater good" is a rather narrow archetype for the fantasy genre.

I would consider it so narrow as to either be:

a) Something that you should implement and the level of a feat or archetype or background rather than a class.
b) Something that is highly setting specific to a setting and only because the archetype is so important to the culture of that setting should it be implemented as a class.

Interestingly, I consider 'Bard' to be a case of 'b'. Bard is not a widely reoccurring fantasy archetype. It's a highly specialized niche that has become accepted as normal with D&D. However, Bard is vastly more reoccurring than a hero that poisons himself for the greater good, for which I'm having a hard time thinking of a compelling example. I can think of many heroes that sacrifice themselves for the greater good, but that's a plot element and not something to build a class around. Any class could choose to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.

I would also suggest that "the quiet self-sufficient capable type" is more of a literary character (as in personality, not class) archetype, rather than the more generic and fantasy themed archetypes character classes need to be.

Agreed. When defining what should be a class, you should be very careful indeed to not confuse personality with the class. My defining characteristic of a good class is that you could fill an entire party with six PC's of that class, and yet still potentially have each be highly distinctive in personality and capabilities. If your class is so narrow that it can't pass that test, it's probably too narrow to consider being a class.

Thus, "Knight in shining armor" is a generally recognized, if not generally liked, archetype.

This would be a case in point. I would not consider "Knight in Shining Armor" to be a class. Although it would not be impossible to have six highly diverse "Knights in Shining Armor", I would not expect six players to show up with six Knights In Shining Armor and to get six very different characters as a result. The archetype is too narrow to be a class, and conveniently, in 5e terms it is an literally an archetype (or should be an archetype) and not a class.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, obviously, for want of a WARLORD class, we're missing The Leader...

I'm not convinced 'the leader' is a class in and of itself, nor am I convinced that the best mechanical implementation of 'good at leading others in battle' is a class rather than say one or more skills or one or more feats (or both).

and, more broadly, since the Fighter doesn't come close outside of kicking ass, the most basic of all heroic tropes, The Hero.

I completely disagree. The Hero is not a class. Just because something is a trope does not make it a class. Again, 'The Hero' does not pass my basic test of whether something is a class - could you have an entire party with the class 'The Hero' that share a core idea, and yet also have them have different personalities and capabilities. Functionally, 'The Hero' tends to occur most often when the focus of the narrative is on a single individual, and the rest of the team is composed of sidekicks that are narrative appendages of the protagonist. I think this is obviously a bad thing in an RPG. Otherwise, even in Band of Five structures, the Hero is largely defined by their in narrative relationship to the other characters - the Apollo to the Starbuck, or the Ken to the Joe. He's the 'clean cut' fighter to the 'rebel bad boy' fighter, but in a team of wizards he'd be the 'clean cut' wizard to the 'rebel bad boy' wizard. In D&D terms, the class defines the capabilities, not the role of the character in the story. Granted, a NAR game might define class according to their role in the story ("Side Kick", for instance), but I think the OP's question was directed toward D&D.

Also perennially absent form RPGs in general, and D&D in particular, is The Reluctant Hero.

Again, 'Reluctant Hero' is a personality of a character or a story role. Tropes are not classes! You could have a reluctant cleric hero, or a reluctant wizard hero, or a reluctant rogue hero, or a reluctant folk hero, or a reluctant hero of any class. Creating that is a function of a Role Playing skill, and not a class. Even if you could create that as a class, to make it work would still require role-playing skill, and it would be a very different heavily Nar game where 'reluctant hero' was actually a class.

Also somewhat similarly, the Destined Hero is a thing D&D doesn't do too well, either.

If you mean by that 'The Chosen One', then D&D shouldn't do that for the same reason it shouldn't have a 'The Hero' class. But if you mean that simply that the character is lucky or favored, then I feel that falls under the same category as 'Folk Hero' I mentioned above. (Indeed, my attempted implementation of the folk hero class depends heavily on leveraging a pool of 'destiny points'.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

The Hero is not a class.

We're talking archetypes, not classes - though classes, as the single most powerful PC-defining choice in D&D, are an obvious way to go to model an archetype. The Hero is an archetype that D&D under-serves. A specific class might be a solution, but it'd probably obviate the fighter in the process, so it's a thorny issue, bringing the fighter up to a level & breadth of competence sufficient to fill the archetype's shoes would be the better one, IMHO. It'd mean making the fighter more capable in the other two pillars than it ever has been in the game's history.

I would not consider "Knight in Shining Armor" to be a class.

Yeah, I'm seeing a pattern with what you consider a class. If it's not already a class, you wouldn't consider it one. ;P

Seriously, though, D&D /does/ cover the Knight in Shining Armor archetype pretty spectacularly, as long as you're a devout/magic-using Knight in Shining Armor: the Paladin.

I'm not convinced 'the leader' is a class in and of itself

It's /been/ a class, in and of itself, and a good one. (It's also been an awful one, the Miniatures Handbook 'Marshal.') And it's an archetype that currently is badly under-supported. The 5e bard works for a magic-using charismatic-leader who inspires you with song & story - a narrow sub-set/alternative-form of the archetype. Nothing like that leaps to mind from genre. But, song-as-magic is certainly represented - by Orpheus, Talesin, and various modern fantasy series (Spellsinger, for a quirky example) - just not coupled with leadership, particularly.
Oh, and 5e has a feat that uses the word 'leader.'
That's about it.

Again, 'Reluctant Hero' is a personality of a character or a story role. You could have a reluctant cleric hero, or a reluctant wizard hero, or a reluctant rogue hero, or a reluctant folk hero, or a reluctant hero of any class. Creating that is a function of a Role Playing skill, and not a class.

We get it, only extant classes are classes. :sigh:
In this case, though, I think you're missing the point: It's not that D&D lacks a class that /makes/ you a Reluctant Hero, it's that most classes make you a very enthusiastic/determined Adventurer. You can't be a reluctant wizard or cleric or fighter or paladin or what not, because all those classes required a certain amount (often a tremendous amount) of determination & commitment to acquire.
You could be a reluctant Sorcerer, though, or tricked into a Warlock pact, perhaps.

But if you mean that simply that the character is lucky or favored, then I feel that falls under the same category as 'Folk Hero' I mentioned above. (Indeed, my attempted implementation of the folk hero class depends heavily on leveraging a pool of 'destiny points'.)

/Destined/. Maybe not for success, but for a critical role in events. D&D's general zero-to-hero arc and instant death rules make it unsuitable. The archetype is more suited to fiction than RPGs.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Hmm I don't know that the guy who posions himself for the greater good makes that great a class. I personally found the Bloodhunter to be really fiddly for a 5e class and more suited to something like pathfinder. Though if I wanted to play the character that hurt himself for the greater good I could always go Berserker.

As far as some other concepts like Reluctant Hero, I think those are great ideas for Backgrounds.

 

[Celebrim]

It's /been/ a class, in and of itself, and a good one.

Technically, it's been a group of classes that had the metagame role 'Leader'. And that was in 4e. What I think you mean is the Warlord which was the role Leader with the power-source or flavor 'Martial'.

And I think that worked OK for 4e given the assumptions of 4e about the sort of game that would be played at the table, but even Warlord is not the same as 'The Leader'. Indeed, you could have a Warlord in a party and the Warlord not be 'The Leader'. The Warlord could instead be 'The Smart Guy' or 'The Heart' and the role of 'The Leader' could be being filled by some other member of the team.

Fundamentally, I feel that 'The Warlord' is an archetype or subset of abilities that Fighters should be able to invest in. In other words, I think that as part of what makes Fighters balanced with spell-casting classes, they have to be much more broad than "hits things with a stick...hard". D&D has unfortunately got itself trapped in the idea that fighters are inherently big dumb brutes, and that's the limit of the archetype 'the fighter' covers. This is at odds with how Fighter worked in earlier versions of D&D, where you could play The Captain as well as The Muscle with the same class, and I think it is a big factor in the 3e and later era problem of spellcasters being better than noncasters. That is, a Wizard isn't limited to just hitting things with a fireball shaped stick.

And it's an archetype that currently is badly under-supported.

That I don't disagree with.

And there's a feat that uses the word 'leader.'

The fact that leadership got associated with a terribly designed feat that was mainly trying to be backwards compatible with the concepts in 1e of achieving name level and getting followers is a big part of why we have terrible support for the concept of leadership.

 

[Colder]

I think gadgeteers and non-beastmaster proxy heroes are still pretty lacking. The artificer is alright but other than their subclass, they don't quite feel like active inventors in actual play.

 

[Celebrim]

We get it, only extant classes are classes. :sigh:

I didn't say that.

In fact, I listed 4 extant classes that either aren't classes or are badly designed, and 3 non-extant classes that should be classes.

I'll go ahead and add a 4th non-extant class that I feel should be a base class, and that's 'The Explorer'. Although The Explorer could be a specific example of 'The Truly Skilled/The Adventuring Sage', I feel The Explorer is a iconic figure that I feel is neither The Fighter nor The Rogue nor The Sage, but somewhere between them. D&D lacks a class that really fits well for a character that is defined by his ability to travel and move and negotiate a broad set of obstacles. It's an obvious missing 'Jack of All Jobs' sort of class, that fits well for mariners, scouts, guides, and generic adventurers, where the character wouldn't be covered well by Bard or Ranger (because those classes are excessively narrow to begin with) or even by The Rogue. IMO, 'Indiana Jones' is the iconic Explorer. Currently you can't even achieve the class IMO, and you can get close only by multi-classing. Truly important archetypes ought to be achievable at 1st level.

In this case, though, I think you're missing the point: It's not that D&D lacks a class that /makes/ you a Reluctant Hero, it's that most classes make you a very enthusiastic/determined Adventurer. You can't be a reluctant wizard or cleric or fighter or paladin or what not, because all those classes required a certain amount (often a tremendous amount) of determination & commitment to acquire.

Err.... I think you are missing the point. You can be a very determined and enthusiastic wizard, without the slightest either wanting to be an adventurer much less (and this is the most critical point you are missing) wanting to be The Hero. It's very easy to play a Reluctant Hero right now in D&D. It's just demands more RP and more thespian focus than many groups have to personify the character, but I can easily conceive even a Reluctant Hero paladin right now.

Heck, in my current game, the party's primary henchman - up until he was eaten by a rift in reality - was a reluctant hero. The character was a drunkard knight suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and generally a failure in life, that the party had half convinced to help them and half dragged him half-sober out of a bar.

/Destined/. Maybe not for success, but for a critical role in events. D&D's general zero-to-hero arc and instant death rules make it unsuitable. The archetype is more suited to fiction than RPGs.

As long as we are not having to guarantee success, then we can implement this in D&D. Indeed, I already have done so for 3.X - the Paragon class.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'll go ahead and add a 4th non-extant class that I feel should be a base class, and that's 'The Explorer'. Although The Explorer could be a specific example of 'The Truly Skilled/The Adventuring Sage', I feel The Explorer is a iconic figure that I feel is neither The Fighter nor The Rogue nor The Sage, but somewhere between them.

Nor the Ranger, I suppose?

D&D lacks a class that really fits well for a character that is defined by his ability to travel and move and negotiate a broad set of obstacles. IMO, 'Indiana Jones' is the iconic Explorer. Currently you can't even achieve the class IMO, and you can get close only by multi-classing.

Breadth of competency is something D&D seems to have trouble accepting. It has no trouble with tremendous versatility in spellcasting, on the theory that you can only have so many spells prepared, but simple, broad-based competence seems inconceivable in D&D class designs.

As I often have, I blame the original Greyhawk Thief for setting up that niche-protection/incompetence-generation precedent. Ironically, the Rogue outgrew all that and doesn't need the Thief niche protected, anymore, yet the Fighter still suffers a near-total lack of non-combat class features in respect for that and other vanished niches (and, less egregiously, Find Traps was nerfed into the ground).

Truly important archetypes ought to be achievable at 1st level.

Sub-classes get in the way of that ideal, certainly.

You can be a very determined and enthusiastic wizard, without the slightest either wanting to be an adventurer

Unless the world has colleges of magic and the determined wizard unlimited financial resources, the impetus for adventure is strong. If you have to go into tombs and ruins and onto other planes to dig up magical secrets rather than just go to Hogwarts, anyway.

much less (and this is the most critical point you are missing) wanting to be The Hero. It's very easy to play a Reluctant Hero right now in D&D.

It's very easy to play a Murder Hobo.

Technically, it's been a group of classes that had the metagame role 'Leader'.

Not really. The 'Leader' Role, quite specifically, was not necessarily a leader in that sense. (Nor was it 'meta-game.') You've made the point repeatedly that class is about the character's capabilities, not his role. In this case, the Warlord was the class that had the capabilities that allowed it to be a capable leader - or The Leader in the archetype sense. Whether it actually led the party in the sense of making decisions was entirely independent of those capabilities.

Outside of magic, such capabilities are virtually absent from 5e. You have a feat, a possibly-not-magical Bard feature (inextricably tied to a full-caster class), and a couple of very minor sub-class features (bordering on ribbons).

Fundamentally, I feel that 'The Warlord' is an archetype or subset of abilities that Fighters should be able to invest in. In other words, I think that as part of what makes Fighters balanced with spell-casting classes, they have to be much more broad than "hits things with a stick...hard". D&D has unfortunately got itself trapped in the idea that fighters are inherently big dumb brutes, and that's the limit of the archetype 'the fighter' covers.

The fighter could do with a great deal of expansion in competence outside of its current, narrow DPR specialization without running into any balance issues. It could be expanded to fill The Hero archetype quite handily, for instance.

The competencies of The Leader archetype - and the Warlord class, which encompasses, but goes beyond the archetype - OTOH, go in a different direction.

The fact that leadership got associated with a terribly designed feat that was mainly trying to be backwards compatible with the concepts in 1e of achieving name level and getting followers is a big part of why we have terrible support for the concept of leadership.

I'm not sure it's about name level (you can take it at 4th), I think it may well have been a word game, though: "Inspiring" and "leadership" got thrown around a lot in the playtest, and 'Inspiration' got slapped on two different mechanics, and 'Inspiring Leader' on a feat.

There has been a lot of that from WotC over the years. A word gets used in complaints for a while, and they find a way to paste that word to something else. The most cynical example, IMHO, was 'Core.' For years, people played 'Core Only' to avoid all the broken crap in supplements (let alone 3pp crap), so, rev rolls, and suddenly every player-facing supplement has 'Core Rulebook' right on the cover.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I'm not entirely sure what this thread is getting at. A lot of the terms being thrown around like "reluctant and quiet hero" is just role playing. You can do that with any class. You don't need new classes or other rules to play that guy.

Also, a lot of what some people seems to be calling Archetypes are handled just fine with Backgrounds. There's the Local Hero and Criminal already.

When I think of archetypes, I think of characters from fantasy literature and wonder how I'd recreate them with the D&D rules. I think 5E really expanded the archetypes it covers with the addition of the Warlock class alone. It's really evocative and one of my favorite additions to the game.

I also take a fairly expansive view of the archetypes. Like I just made a War-Cleric/Abjurer who's a Knight in Shining Armor. He uses magic to be more effective as a combatant but he looks more like Lancelot than Merlin. My inspiration for him are the Pandion Knights from David Eddings' Elenium trilogy.

Honestly 5E is so flexible that I have trouble finding any archetype I cannot recreate with the proper selection of Background, Feats, Mutlclassing, and creative re-interpretation of the RAW. (I re-write the flavor text freely for class abilities, spell descriptions, and such, as long as the RAW doesn't change)

I agree with the posters above that the one concept that 5E doesn't cover well is the summoner/spiritualist. I want a guy who speaks with the spirits of the lakes and the air, who summons wind spirits to do his bidding, and so forth. I could probably build this with a sorcerer, a custom bloodline, and proper spell selection though, so I'm don't consider it a total loss.