Amidst the chaos of attending weddings, traveling, and
teaching classes, I've been left with little time to actually sit down and play
games, especially new games, the games I want to sink into and explore. I'm sure this will change soon enough: once
teaching settles into a routine punctuated by furious feedback distribution and
the blur of travel dissipates, a bevy of amazing titles will drop on the PC,
including Dragon Age: Inquisition,
one of the few games in a long while to make me genuinely excited (Mass Effect 3 style multiplayer slapped
on to one of my favorite RPG franchises of all time?! Sign me up!) and I'll be compelled to play
them and, in turn, write about them.
It's a wonderfully vicious cycle I've been disconnected from
for a while, between seeping depression and the queer, creeping miasma of unemployment,
which manifests itself partially by pushing me away from seeking new
experiences. But now that that's
resolved, I've been getting back into the swing of things, so much so that I'm
working to re-boot my D&D
campaign with some new players. That means
rolling new characters and, in keeping with the composition of my group, which
is made up almost entirely of people who do not come from gaming backgrounds,
explaining the mechanics of Dungeons and
Dragons, and games in general.
See, Dungeons and
Dragons takes the notion of class roles and makes them very, very explicit,
dictating how classes, generally, should be expected to interact. That could potentially stymie player input
into how the game can be shaped, and how combinations of those classes (or different
members of identical classes) might interact, but the marvel of D&D's design is how different each
class actually approaches their role in question. Rogues and rangers, for example, both draw
from the same power source and fulfill the same role, that of the Striker,
dealing large amounts of damage to a single target. But the way each of those classes engage with
those roles is very, very different.
Where a ranger will just do massive amounts of damage from the outskirts
of combat, a rogue will move in and out, stacking deleterious status effects on
enemies and using combat advantage to sometimes out-damage the ranger, but
usually doing a little bit less damage with each individual attack. While technically operating in the same
capacity, the two do two very different things: one works slowly and steadily
to isolate and destroy enemies, the other moves around the battlefield,
capitalizing on chaos. And even those
are just two possible conceptualizations of those classes: a ranger could just
as easily build themselves as a secondary tank with a focus on dealing damage
who wades into combat and draws attention to herself. A rogue could pursue a ranged build and plink
enemies from the side-lines, knocking them around the battlefield and forcing
them to expose vulnerabilities.
This conceptualization of roles is something Dungeons and Dragons does particularly
well, along with its ability to make the interplay of those roles truly dynamic
for its player base. There's a sweet
science to seeing how various classes can fit together, and some of the fun of
the game comes from watching it almost but not quite happen over the course of
play. But what's truly remarkable is how
D&D, with a relatively simple set
of role archetypes, has managed to generate a set of roles that can be applied
to near any existent video game.
Bear with me. I'm not
just talking about RPGs, or RPG-like games here. I'm talking about any multiplayer game with
any notion of teamwork at its core. Mechwarrior: Online, for example. In MWO a
number of weight classes are interacting constantly during the course of play,
occupying various combat roles.
Brawlers, for example, are analogous with tanks. But the difference between a Stalker kitted
out as a brawler, who will stand in the middle of a fight drawing fire and
drawing enemy attention away from smaller, better armed or better positioned
teammates who can then strike vulnerable areas on the other mechs, and a
Cataphract kitted out as a brawler, who might wade into combat, briefly deliver
a set of fierce blows, and then drop back to a firing line, hoping the enemy
will follow, is profound. And we haven't
even touched on medium brawlers, who play on superior maneuverability and
moderate payload size to constantly keep enemy forces off balance, or my
personal favorite odd-brawler, the tiny Spider light mech, whose strange
hitboxing and incredible speed make it surprisingly resilient and highly capable
of sowing chaos in engagements.
While it might seem a stretch, I invite readers familiar
with the game to consider MWO in this
light, where mechs may also take on the role of Strikers (by maximizing direct
damage payloads and volley firing at enemy mechs), Controllers (by maximizing
indirect damage payloads and dumping LRMs or special artillery or airstrikes on
enemies), and Leaders (by utilizing support abilities to do things like tag
enemies for indirect fire, or protect allies from long range weapons
fire). While it isn't a perfect
parallel, the role paradigms themselves are foundationally imperfect, so I
don't feel too sour about twisting them into a new shape a little. Sure, your average brawler can still do quite
a bit of damage, but his role in combat is to hold the attention of the enemy
with his play style. Other players will
likely as not be able to out damage him.
Likewise, your leader might be supporting his teammates, but an
Atlas-D-DC can both fit into a Leader role, and stands as one of the most
robust damage dealers in the game (and one of the most intimidating bullet
magnets as well).
I'd go so far as to project these roles on to other games,
fast paced team games where these roles might shift fluidly. For example, in chaotic shooters like Call of Duty or Titanfall, players might draw enemy attention so that another
player can get a clear shot at a foe. Or
players might lay down suppressing fire on entrenched enemy positions or mine
areas to control territory. That
fundamental interplay of attention holding defenders/tanks, hard hitting
strikers, area denying controllers and supportive leaders all present
themselves (though I will admit, the leadership role seems to fade in prominence
in faster paced games).
Perhaps I'm simply, as I often do, perceiving a gestalt
where none exists, an old habit that never seems to leave the hearts or minds
of writers, literary theorists, and people with obsessive compulsive
disorder. It wouldn't be the first time,
and it certainly won't be the last. But
it's fascinating to consider how readily we, as players, seem to manifest these
roles, even when we're not presented them directly, and how we, as players,
twist them and reshape them until they become something that we're engaging
with fluidly. That's the real power of
these archetypes: by not merely presenting us with a familiar framework to
engage with our environments, but codifying behavioral patterns we already
engage in, we become more aware of these patterns and, in turn, more capable of
shaping them into something new and different.
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