Role Playing Tropes: Four Classes

     Role-playing began with wargaming - people built armies and attacked other people's armies. Then, says legend, Gary Gygax asked "What if you were one soldier on the battlefield?" The people in the original role-playing group were reading Tolkien and studying medieval history. If they had been reading Heinlein and studying engineering and astrophysics, I imagine gaming would look a little different.

     The wargaming, fantasy, and medieval origins of Dungeons and Dragons plays a key role in its tropes. For example, the four classes - fighter, cleric, wizard, and rogue. Fighter is fairly easy to see - on the battlefield, the soldier is a fighter. Cleric makes some sense. Medieval armies had priests with them for blessings and prayers. And wizards - well, what's fantasy without spellcasters? The thief (called rogue in later editions) was added for city adventuring.

     An interesting thing about fighters is that they are always geared toward being toe-to-toe melee combatants. There might be customization options, but a ranged or deterity focused fighter has wasted and mismatched class features in third edition, and must choose another class altogether in fourth.

     There is a class variant in "Unearthed Arcana" for third edition which works well for dexterous and ranged fighters. Start with a rogue. Remove the sneak attack and add the fighter's bonus feats. Compared with the fighter class, you sacrifice fortitude for reflexes. You don't have the array of weapons and armor, but you have defensive abilities the fighter doesn't (uncanny dodge, evasion, trap sense). You have a lower attack but more skills to jump and tumble across the battlefield. Essentially, you have a class designed for mobile combat, skilled in new areas.

     In older editions, Clerics couldn't use bladed weapons. They could beat someone to death with a mace - but if they fought with a sword, they lost their powers. That changed in third edition, when they were given broader access to weapons and armor. I think they should have dialed back the armor proficiencies and given them more skill points, but that's just me. Now, with D&D Next, larger portions of the cleric's class features are determined by their deity choice. This pleases me.

     Finally, there's the wizard, who illustrates the question of relative power and levels. There are those who complain that, in third edition, a 20th level fighter is powerless next to a 20th level wizard, and at low levels the wizard is powerless next to the fighter. Some argue that's how it should be, but I think level should mean something - people of a given level should be of the same power.

     I tried to fix that in my games - more low-level spells and fewer high-level spells for wizards, for example - but didn't get it quite right. Then came fourth edition, and everybody's the same power at every level. Perhaps it went too far - people complained that all classes were essentially the same. D&D Next is trying to fix that by giving wizards reusable low-level spells and fiddling with spellcasting. We'll see how that works out.

     I don't have any comments on the rogue today, but I will come back around to them.