Dispensible: Warriors

     The next character archetype on the chopping block is the warrior. 
     As far as D&D is concerned, I'm referring mostly to fighters and barbarians; classes that are the typical "tank" in that they are designed specifically to deal and take damage. These are the classes whose job is to stroll out into the front of the battlefield and start swinging. 
     The line here gets a little fuzzy, though. D&D has a lot of classes that are considered "martial" classes. Mostly, these are classes that have the defining characteristic of having the best Base Attack Bonus and the most combat-oriented special abilities. However, many of these do not qualify as tanks, as far as I'm concerned. Rangers and swashbucklers, for instance, might be able to put out a lot of damage, but their limited armor selection and relatively low hit points make them mighty vulnerable in a front-line situation. The paladin suffers similarly, because they have a lot of nifty special abilities that are a nice touch, but that really just get in the way of essential tank-duties.
     The thing to keep in mind is that if a warrior wants to keep from lagging behind in the damage-dealing business, he or she really needs to focus. In my last post, when I was talking about the fighter dishing out as much as the warmage, I was talking about a high level character who had enough feats to really specialize. And the times he was dealing massive amounts of damage involved using Power Attack with a magical two-handed weapon that would cause a critical hit on every third or fourth attack. Weapon combat takes a lot of money and time to make as damaging as even the most basic arcane attack spell. It's really just Strength plus weapon damage, and neither of those increases much without a lot of levels and gold pieces (to buff up your ability points and to add bonuses to your weapon). There are a handful of feats (like Power Attack) that help a lot, but that's it. While I've seen a well-built fighter keep up with the damage-dealing, I've seen just as many fall behind. Using a single-handed weapon without Power Attack, for instance, isn't going to do much more than 10 points of damage on average (and that's even assuming an 18 Strength with a magical weapon). Compare that to the 17.5 average damage done by a single fireball from the lowest possible level wizard (minimum level 5 to cast third-level spells).
     So if you're looking for damage output, it's pretty easy to replace the tank with a combat-focused mage or even a good archer (especially with feats like Rapid Shot and Multishot). We've even talked about how a rogue can dish out roughly the same amount of damage in sneak attack dice. I can personally attest to this, since I just had a game session where my 5th level rogue did roughly 60 points of damage in three rounds. Built for melee, with a keen rapier (15-20 crit threat range) and the Telling Blow feat (which allows you to add your sneak attack dice to any crit), a rogue can fairly consistently crit and deal massive amounts of damage. Or, instead of relying on crits, a melee rogue can go the Bluff-Feint route, and still get their sneak attack dice more often than not. Not to mention that much of the time a rogue gets to attack a flat-footed opponent and a mage gets to make touch attacks (if they have to make any rolls at all), which helps make up for their lower BABs (as compared with a warrior). Either way, we see a lot of damage can be done by a non-martial classes.

Well, they normally wear good armor...

     Which leaves the tank's real purpose to be in attack-absorption. In all fairness, this is one place where no other character type can really compare. Warriors can wear the best armor and have the most hit points. They also are great at drawing a lot of attention to themselves. The horde of baddies are going to pay more attention to the full-plated fighter who is a whirlwind of blades or the frothing, raging, axe-wielding barbarian than they are those hanging back and doing things that are ostensibly less threatening. That is a drawback in a party that has no tank; the damage is likely going to be more distributed among the squishier classes. 
     This is not an insurmountable challenge. The key with a party without a tank is just that it needs a number of other front-line characters to help absorb the damage. Split up even among "weaker" classes, usually you won't get total party kills (provided that the GM is giving you appropriately-leveled encounters, no single encounter should be enough to drop you all).  So long as there is enough healing to go around, and as long as the party is smart about it (and not afraid to retreat if necessary), they should survive with no problem. 
     As far as parties that are missing key archetypes go, the tank-less party lends itself to a game that could be far more interesting in the long run. The non-fighter characters are apt to have the lion's share of the party's skills, anyway, so non-combat scenarios won't be affected. This type of party might even lead to a subtler, less combat-oriented campaign, which can be just as fun. So go ahead, give it a try!

Dispensible: Arcane Casters

     Easily the most replaceable character type in the D&D world is the arcane caster. I mean no disrespect, but experience and logic tell me that most games can still be completed without having a mage-type (wizard, sorcerer, etc).
     First, let's think about what a mage does. They cast spells, and that's pretty much it. Still a very important role, to be sure, but that also depends on the types of spells. An arcane caster really only has two types of spells: damage and stat-effect (buffs, debuffs, etc). Sure, there are spells that can do all sorts of random effects, but those are almost never used. Leomund's Tiny Hut sounds fun, but what caster in their right mind would waste the spell slot on it? Let's face it, magic is prepped for combat, and not much else. There are spells that could help in social situations, yes, but the Face of your party should be able to handle that without help. There are spells that can aid in stealth, but the rogue or ranger should have that angle covered. Finally, let's face it, both of those situations can also be circumvented if your party isn't quite diplomatic or sneaky enough. Most of those situations involve brute force, but still, the job can get done.
     If you're looking for an effect-caster, it has been my experience that a cleric can fill this role just as well (if not better). Their spells are mostly designed for support: buff, debuff, healing, and summoning. A divine caster tends to have spells that help the party as a whole, not just the cleric himself. Not to mention, when the chips are down, a cleric has decent attack and defense capabilities (so if they manage to run out of spells, they can still hit things with a mace and hide behind heavy armors and shields). Mages, on the other hand, are just squishy sacks waiting to get the beatdown if they run out of spell slots.
     Where arcane casters corner the market is damage-dealings spells. And don't get me wrong, nobody can output as much damage per round as a sorcerer built for evocation. A single well-placed fireball or lightning bolt can deal more damage than any other single character. But if all you're looking for is a damage-dealing machine, is a mage really a better option than a well-designed fighter? 
     In one of my campaigns, we reached mid-to-high level (12-17). At the end, it was something of a competition between the warmage, the fighter, and the rogue as to who could deal the most damage in a single round. A crit with Power Attack on the fighter's keen falchion was on the same level as the rogue's 8 or 9 sneak attack dice and the warmage's fireballs. So it is certainly still possible to maintain the appropriate damage-dealing threshold with non-spellcasters.
     Also consider that, as far as damage-dealing goes, there are plenty of monsters that have spell resistance and resistances or immunities to energy damage. That means there are chances that a mage's spells are going to fizzle or deal far less than optimum damage. Sure, there's damage reduction, but by the time you get those monsters your main weapon-damage-dealers (i.e. the fighter) should have a magic weapon anyway, which overcomes 95% of all DR out there. Basically, there's a respectable percentage of monsters that are immune to fireballs or lightning bolts, but pretty much nothing is immune to getting chopped to bits with sharp pieces of metal.
     So, while a wizard is a welcome addition to any adventuring party, in my opinion if you have to vote out one of the four traditional classes (for example, if you only have four players), then the arcane caster should be the first one on the chopping block.

Dispensible

     The last two D&D campaigns I've been in have had an interesting mix of characters. I don't mean just personality and role-playing wise, either (because I'm proud to say that my crew of gamers always come up with good stuff in that regard). But we've managed to pull off parties that are ostensibly missing essential archetypes.
     I generally break down a standard four-person party as thus: the fighter (or barbarian, paladin, or other tank-like melee character), the arcane caster (wizard or sorcerer), the divine caster (cleric, or a druid built specifically for healing and spellcasting), and the rogue. Each has a specific role to play and niche to fill, and it's hard to make a go of any adventure without all of the different talents each one brings to the table.
     Or is it?
     In my first campaign with this particular group of mine, the players made it through the entire first half of the game (levels 1-10) without an arcane caster. Currently, we are about to wrap up the first leg of a campaign that has no tank (we're level 6, so we've made it pretty far, I'd say). From the standpoint of a traditional party, these groups shouldn't work. But they have.
     Now, there are plenty of articles and blogs out there about how to get around in D&D without certain classes being present in the adventuring party. I've read some of these, and many of them are simple speculation based upon the rules. A quick tip for those of you not intimately familiar with rpgs: games rarely end up the way the rules say they should. Take this from the guy who knows how to build a pretty damn good character and can still suck 95% of the time because he can't seem to roll double-digits on a 20-sided die.
     So I'm going to start a short series on how to survive in a party that is missing one of the key four archetypes. I'm going to base this on my own experience, not just what the rules say are possible or plausible. Some of it's going to work, but some of it just looks good on paper and really doesn't pan out in reality.
     So, where to start...?

The Gardener and the Architect

     Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend and my wife (then girlfriend) about Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Now, this post isn't really about that, although if you haven't read it I highly recommend it (power through the first book, it'll be worth it later). But part of the premise of the series involves the metaphysical idea that stories come from "somewhere else." In this way, King starts to tie together almost every other novel and story he has written, making the entire Dark Tower series read like a scavenger hunt or Where's Waldo as you pick out the little cameos made by characters from his other stories.
     This lead to the conversation about stories existing "outside," and that all we really do is access them and write them down. Which, in my opinion, is highly insulting. I resent the idea that I'm not actually doing the work, that instead all I'm doing is scribing down something that was created in some nebulous ether. It's like saying aliens built the pyramids; why can't we just accept that humans are capable of such feats? My opposition to such an idea is compounded by the fact that when King himself advocates such notions, he just makes himself seem like even more of an arrogant ass than he already does. Oh, you're not a world-creating God, but just the chosen Prophet sent to give us the Word? That's much more humble.

Muses: Like you're going to get anything done with all this going on.

     Now, I'm not retracting my stance on the subject. When I write, I am not just drawing on the dreams of some collective consciousness, or any other hipster art-student crap. I'm working damn hard to build something, and I'm not going to let some ill-defined pseudo-mystical muse take the credit.
     However, related to this idea is the thought that stories "go where they want to go." In the same way that we, as writers, don't really create the tales we tell, we also have to allow our characters and plots to "be true to themselves." I found this idea similarly insulting: they're my stories and they will do what I damn well tell them to.
     Unfortunately, that's not necessarily true, and it's time I admit that.
     I've been working on a space-opera sci-fi novel for some time, and it hasn't been coming along as well as I'd hope. Part of the problem is that I developed the world and plot first, then came up with characters to go into it. In my previous novels, it went the other way around: I had characters first, and then found a story to put them in. This seems to work the best for me, because I want my stories to be driven by the characters, so they must come first.
     I was discussing this with another friend of mine last week, and he brought up the idea of the writer either as Architect or Gardener. 
     The Architect plans and structures everything, like following blueprints. The Architect is the type of writer who has notebooks full of timelines and outlines and tack-boards full of sticky notes that order everything in the story. The Architect knows every step of the plot and every development of the characters from start to finish, even before they ever write the first word. They complete via organization, and I imagine they rarely have a hard time finishing anything.
     The Gardener, on the other hand, starts with vague outlines and ideas; a "seed," if you will. They then write and let that seed grow, allowing it to take shape as it will. A Gardener's story evolves organically, typifying this idea that things will go where they want to go, as I mentioned above. It's a style that has much more in common with the hippie metaphysical stuff I used to rail against.
     As is so often the case, though, I was wrong.
     See, in my novel I was having a hard time really getting the characters to click. They just seemed to be plodding along with the plot, and thus just came off flat and two-dimensional. I hate stock characters, but I realized that this was all my novel had.
     This conversation about the Architect/Gardener dynamic made me think about my more successful writing ventures. And I realized I am much more the Gardener. I do tend to use terms like "organic" when describing a way a story grows and progresses (indicating, of course, how smooth and believable transitions are between plots and characters). And my last two novels started as mere ideas that were molded into full stories during the actual creation process. I didn't have a good structure before I started, and it still worked out.
     I took a scene in my current project and tried it out. I made one of the characters react differently in a single scenario, which then chain-reacted and made me have to re-write other scenes and add in completely new ones. It was a pain, but the result is that now I have several character relationships that are actually developed. I have people more than just archetypes, and everybody knows that good characters are what get readers invested. All in all, things are just starting to click into place more with the story, and it's because I "let it go where it wanted to go."
     While I'm still not going to go so far as to say that I am just a mere vessel for the transfer of stories from the ether, I can definitely say that there is something to the idea of stories and characters having a life of their own. When you make a character, and you want that character to be fully realized, then you have to really think about what they would do in a situation. Even if what they would do is not helpful to the situation or the plot as a whole. That's how people are; they rarely do what is needed to go along with the plan. But rather than force it, I'm going to start trying to sit back and see what happens.

     P.S. Those friends of mine who I've mentioned here, you know who you are, and I don't want to hear any I-told-you-so.

Finally Final Fantasy

     I started playing Final Fantasy 3 (or 6, if you're hardcore and insist on referring to it by the original Japanese designation) this last week. It's an odd story that got me there--albeit said story is a bit of a tangent. See, we were at the thrift store looking for pants for my pregnant wife when I heard somebody's cell phone go off. The notification ring was the sound effect used when Mario hits a block and gets a coin. For some reason, this got me thinking that I should play Mario. Note that I did not say "play Mario again." See, I had a Sega when I was a kid, so what we got was Sonic the Hedgehog. I've never actually played any of the Mario games, with a few minor instances where I put in an hour or so at a friend's house.
     But this is not to be a discourse on the pros or cons of Mario versus Sonic. And really, this desire to play Mario morphed into a more general desire to play something more old-school. I had tried this some time ago, but failed. Link to the Past beat me, that's all there is to it. I'd rather not talk about it too much.
     Anyway, I thought it only fair to give FF 3/6 another shot, considering our checkered past. See, when I was in high school, I dated a girl who was obsessed with the game. Now, I know some people who are obsessed with things, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. But this was one of those times where it went to an unhealthy degree. Not just a writing-fan-fiction-and-inserting-yourself-as-a-character degree (which is bad enough), but a you're-not-allowed-to-like-that-game-because-I-love-it-and-it's-mine degree. If FF 3/6 had been a rock star, she probably would have murdered it just to make sure that nobody else could have it.
     Not surprisingly, that relationship did not end well. And some of the scars I carried from it were shaped like this game. Ten years later, I think I'm ready now to see it with fresh, not-crazy eyes. I'm only about 9 hours into the game, but I've already had some revelations.
     1) Considering how many characters there are, they really did not skimp on the characterization. I mean, I've played modern RPGs where you only get a handful of people in your party, but they're all pretty two-dimensional. Sure, some of the characterization is a bit hokey and seems cliche now, but I have to remind myself how old this game is. The depth it gives the game makes me almost understand how you could get obsessed with it.

Also, why do you even bother with a concept artist?

     2) This is probably one of the best steampunk-style games I've seen aside from Arcanum. Now, I know all FFs merge magic and technology to a certain degree, but I think most of the others lean much more heavily towards one or the other. For instance, FF7 was much closer to sci-fi, whereas FF9 was practically just regular fantasy with only a bit of tech thrown in. Also, a lot of FF tech is powered by magic (or some such thing), whereas this one is very specifically steam-power. Makes me think the guys at the Alternate History track at D*C are missing some obvious costuming ideas. Note: I may just be stuck on this element of the game because my favorite character is Edgar, who kills people with steampunk weapons (like phonograph-shaped sonic blasters, giant drills, chemical sprayers, and crossbows that fire like machine guns).
     3) Why, oh why weren't any of these great RPGs ever made for the Sega? The only thing they had was stuff like Fatal Labyrinth, in which there was no story or characters and the only thing that made it remotely like an RPG is that you leveled up and got more stuff. I didn't discover true video game RPGs until I started playing things like Fallout and Baldur's Gate on my computer. I could have grown up with Chrono Trigger and the like? I was robbed.
     4) Does it seem sexist to anyone else that its always the girl characters in a Final Fantasy that are the magic users?
     Anyway, I've torn myself away long enough. I just got Edgar a chainsaw, so don't mind the evil cackles coming from the living room.