I’m intrigued as to why people think a Divine invoker class wont exist.
Arguably Gandalf was such a character and off the top of my head Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey feature a number of Priest characters. David Gemmel features many warriors with divine powers, Cycle of Arawn and the Deryni novels also feature cleric types. Also add in the Exorcist and the evil Bishop in Ladyhawke
It probably wont be the DnD Cleric but a divine invoker/healer (Priest) and Temple Warrior type dont seem out of the question
None of those authors feature characters which are anything like Clerics, which is my point.
Also, some of what you're referring to is just spellcasters who happen to be priests, not spellcasters who get their power from the gods. And with Gemmell I think you're overstating your case - as I recall the "warriors with divine powers" are basically Shaolin monks. Maybe we're thinking of different things though - you didn't specify. Cycle of Arawn is obviously D&D influenced so we can dismiss that. I haven't read the Deryni novels, but my impression is that they're the reason D&D has psionics and articles about them don't make any reference to "divine"-type powers, just psionic-style ones. Maybe it's something deeper in the books people overlook?
Gandalf will be better-recognised as an angel pretending to be a wizard, rather than an actual wizard, in a non-D&D world.
The Exorcist is a little more like what we might see. Specifically, I'd expect a post-anime fusion of Eastern and Western "magic exorcist" tropes in a character class (quite likely not one of the main classes, but one in a later book). You'd basically have a lot of anti-demon, anti-undead (both will still be huge w/o D&D, though zombies may well be separated off from other undead as their own thing, and ghouls will likely be a subset of these "zombie-undead"). So anyway, dudes in big hats who do a lot of shouting at evil and sticking pieces of paper with magic characters on friends/foes, making warding gestures and so on, whilst probably knowing some kind of martial arts are likely.
I don't think there will be any clear arcane/divine separation. If anything, the books will probably hint that these guys think they get their powers from the gods/spirits, but who knows?
Perhaps holy magic wont be stripped of wizards. A "cleric build" would come from a warrior-mage opting to use "white magic" and religious order purposely trained battle healers and banishers via personal focus and not an artificial divine/arcane divide.
Yeah this seems likely - I think we'd see "Holy Wizards" but they'd be Wizards dedicated to a religious cause, and healing spells and so on would likely just be spells any wizard c ould cast. I mean, in virtually all literary fantasy where there's powerful magic, it can be used to heal, and it doesn't rely on the divine at all.
I think it's also likely that there'd be at least two "kinds" of caster - one that used "spells" a la Sparrowhawk/Ged, Merlin, and Harry Potter, and one that used "powers", a la Robin Hobb's Assassin/Farseer books, virtually all "romantic fantasy", most Brandon Sanderson books and so on. I don't think the latter would be called a "Psionicist", though.
Elves and dwarves would be either closer to myths or be very monsterized. Elves would be unable to handle iron and be bound to fey laws. Dwarves would be forced to roll GREED! checks to handle their greed. They likely wouldn't be humans with funny ears.
Agree re: elves but concerns re: anti-Semitism would prevent any rolling "greed" re: dwarves especially given Tolkien
explicitly based his dwarves partially on his perceptions of Jewish culture (to be clear, he regards dwarves as a highly positive portrayal and was certainly not anti-Semitic in any conventional sense, indeed he was pro-Jewish, just prone to the stereotypes of his time). That's probably for the best!
I think this will hold even if dwarves are weird little blue people called dvergar or whatever, because Tolkien.
I'm still thinking fairy tales and fairy-tale adjacent works, like Alice and Wonderland and Wizard of Oz, would be a major influence. Less "group of people slaying the monsters" and more "one person or small group escaping from or outwitting the monsters."
I don't know enough about how CRPGs work, or even computer games in general. What sort of systems are you thinking?
No bell curves, I see.
Actually, I'm thinking--since d6s will still be a thing because of regular board games--that there might be a lot more systems that call for dice pools or exploding dice. Or special dice with symbols on them that mean something. It would probably start as tables and end up with specialized dice. Hmm--did polyhedral dice (or the chit-out-of-the-bag equivalent) come from wargaming, and if so, why did wargames want d10s and d20s?
I'm not entirely convinced that it would be human-only, but I do agree that the races would be very different than they currently are, if there's no Tolkien to push certain ones forward.
OTOH, you still have elves and dwarfs from Norse myth, even if they would look a lot differently from D&D elves and dwarfs.
Hunter, scout, soldier, knight/samurai investigator/detective, brawler... actually, I think that the rogue might not exist (no Tolkien, thus no Burglar) as well and rogue-y skills would simply be a thing that could be taken. There would likely still be an assassin of sorts, and maybe a "street fighter" class, though.
Again, agree. As I wrote earlier, though, I could see a witch or shaman-type--or since this is a game that was created today, something with a better name. Spirit-Talker?
But, this being a game where presumably the gods still exist, I can see creating something--a feat or a piety system--that might allow you to suddenly gain some incredibly good luck for a brief time.
I think that the magic might also be a lot more ritualistic in nature. Eye of newt and tongue of dog indeed. Or possibly alchemical in nature. Whether this becomes two classes or one class with two types of magic, I dunno.
Lot to engage with here, I'll try to keep it brief.
Re: CRPGs/computer games, up until about the late '90s, there was a pretty clear separation between "RPGs" and "other games". There were
always some crossover games (particularly Metroidvanias - i.e. games like Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid and so on), but generally speaking you didn't find things like experience points in shooters, and you didn't find skill trees in platformers and so on. It wasn't an accident, either - you sometimes even got action games based on RPGs which eschewed this stuff - but as the '90s wore on, you'd see more games leaning into being both (sorry to anyone going "Ugh the generalizing!" I'm trying to avoid making this essay-length!). But it wasn't until the 2000s, particularly after 2010, where suddenly virtually every game seems to include "experience points", "levels", often randomized loot/magic items, abilities you can pick from and prioritize (which you may well earn with experience points). It went from rarely-seen to nearly impossible to escape. It used to be "RPG elements" was something of note about a game - now it would pretty much be easier to list games which didn't have them.
Polyhedral dice came from maths teaching equipment IIRC. I doubt they'd be very popular without RPGs, especially D&D, even for wargaming.
Re: Witch/Shaman - Yeah I think a spirit-communicating class is reasonably likely, but it might just be a skill or something rather than a class, and I don't think it'd be a core class in D&D. I suspect it would be either a later class, or not in D&D at all, but in some other RPG.
Agree: re: piety system. Again it wouldn't likely be core, but rather optional and added later, and most people would frown at it.
Also thinking of the gods, they'd be entirely different. D&D's gods were completely bizarre and naive and people are frankly better educated about pagan-style religions today, and there's no way we'd get the weird pagan-christian fusion approach that happened in early D&D. We'd likely see better-developed pantheons with much more "grey" gods morally. We'd also likely see religions in settings being more diverse.
Alignment would be completely different. Moorcock would be further away in time and less influential, and the lack of the weird quasi-Christian gods of early D&D, together with more "realistic" pantheons means few would see the gods as "good", so that kind of knocks out both classical D&D alignment axes. I actually think Law/Chaos might come up again, because it's such a recurrent theme (everything from Moorcock to Wuthering Heights), but it'd likely have a different name. Alignment would probably be either more about personality/individual morality (i.e. somewhat like Palladium), or aligning oneself with some kind of amoral cosmic force.
Re: ritualistic magic, I think it'll be kind of a mix. As noted I think we'll see two kinds of caster ("Harry Potter" and "Mistborn" to put it very simply), and "Harry Potter" casters will use ritualistic magic sometimes, but not all the time.
