Let the Thief Do It

I've heard this sort of thing hundreds of times and this is no reflection on JB ... but he repeated the theory for this post he posted yesterday, motivating me to write this post.

"... if we look at D&D as a 'successful' concept in tabletop RPGs, we can see that at least part of its appeal is how it draws the party together in cooperation for a common objective. And the way it does this is pretty darn simple: while there is 'strength in numbers' (to spread the attrition around), the limitations of each individual class (or, in the positive, the powers and capabilities of each class) provides an incentive to work together to solve the conflicts and problems being thrown at the PCs in their quest for treasure. Mechanically, they're semi-forced to get along with each other, because survival ... and success ... becomes much more difficult without cooperation."

Is that really the case?  Or is it just that we've heard this propounded so often that we take it for granted as something that sounds true?

For a moment, let's deconstruct those "capabilities of each class."  The first two that occur to me is the cleric/healer's ability to bestow healing points on a party and the thief/rogue's willingness to scout ahead.

I'll discuss these forthwith ... but first let me say there's nothing the mage offers that the party technically "needs."  It is nice to have those spells, and certainly the mage can end a fight quickly, but at lower levels a mage is just as likely to be pretty nigh useless in a fight.  But, yes, the mage does offer some informational talents, defining a magic item, comprehending languages, detecting magic and malevolence ... but if we think about it, these are short cuts to things the party is going to find out about eventually, without the mage.  And before the gentle reader chides me that it is better to find out soon than later, please hear me out.

That healing power that's offered means a lot less in the early versions of the game.  A 7th level cleric in 1979 AD&D was able to offer a total maximum of 25 hit points per day, through two spells: cure light wounds and cure serious wounds.  The average was only 14.5.  If the cleric in the party were another fighter, that fighter would easily have more than 25 hit points at 7th level ... which means that another fighter would soak up more hit points than a cleric could heal.  Statistically, the cleric's heal was more or less the difference between what the cleric could soak up at 7th and what a fighter would have.  The only difference is that it could be targeted to other people who got in trouble ~ but it wasn't actually needed.

And as far as scouting ahead ... most of what made this practical was that the thief was forced to do without armor, so that at least one member of the party wasn't crashing around in metal plates and chains.  In truth, in most situations, any elven fighter willing to sacrifice armor class could have done almost as well as a thief ~ and would have survived being discovered better if it comes down to that.

Here is the thing, however.  Because the module-makers and designers KNEW there were going to be thieves, mages and clerics, they designed the environment specifically to take advantage of those skills.  If you get rid of traps, there's no need for the find traps skill, or for renewing someone's hit points to make them battle-ready because some arrow trap sapped 5 hit points from the fighter.  If you get rid of the endless stream of languages, or runes and glyphs, or make the magic items recognizable, or simply get rid of scores of other "make work" features that we expect to find in every dungeon, the truth is that these other classes may have style and character, but they're not actually a "necessity."

I don't think that JB is wrong; in D&D, the player characters ARE semi-forced to get along with each other for survival ... but not for the reasons he proposes.

By creating these make-work processes for the various classes, D&D dupes the players into thinking they need Fred for his healing and Gary for his stealth.  That's let's Harold keep his armor and it lets him gripe that he's down hit points, as he knows Fred is there for him.  If there was no Fred or Gary, Harold wouldn't lazily rely on them.  And if there was no Harold, Fred and Gary would know they'd have to do their own fighting ... which would suck.

It isn't so much that four fighters in a world that wasn't tailor made for other class abilities couldn't get along ... it's that if they were four fighters, they'd squabble and bitch about whose turn it was to shuck off their armor and scout ahead.  They'd hold constant pissing contests about which was the toughest fighter and who did the best in the last fight, with three of them mocking the lowest of the four for having the least kills and for constantly tripping over his 20-sided fumbles.

A fighter can comfortably hang back while "his bitch" scouts ahead, waiting for "doc" to patch him up ... while the thief can hang back while his bitch fights off the orcs.  It isn't what each member of the party does.  It's about what each member of the party lets the other character do.

JB's post talks about how the superhero genre doesn't produce this effect:

"Supers tend to be fairly capable individuals, able to handle whole swaths of mooks and villains on their own, only being held back by individual flaws ... But for a team of heroes, such flaws rarely come up, because it would tend to throw one hero under the bus while her teammates heroically soldier on. Instead, the tendency is to simply throw one Giant Big Bad Threat at the team that requires the full might of the team to overcome: an Uber-Villain or a Villain Team (one foe for each hero!) or a Humongous Natural Disaster."

Effectively, we have to assign players roles in the fight so they know what to do ... because a typical group of players are unable to assign themselves tasks like grown ups.  This is why the army invented sargeants; because a group of extremely capable soldiers, left to themselves, won't get anything done.

I hadn't seen it before, but the class structure creates a series of jobs for each player to do.  Yes, true, another player or class could do those jobs.  The 7th level druid could (as the rules originally went) transform into a mouse for every single scouting ahead mission, which was certainly a lot more stealthy than a thief ~ but even though I ran such druids, this never happened.  Presumedly, because it wasn't the druid's job.

Admittedly, this isn't where I thought I'd end up.  I thought I was going to explode this myth of players working together because they were different classes ... and instead I've strengthened the idea that they have to be different classes.  Not because it helps the players work together, but because players don't like to work together.

If anyone has some memories of 3rd Edition, where builds tended to make players the same, where the problem of "who's turn is it?" came up a lot, I'd love to hear about it.

Somewhere, there's a party busy rewriting their characters while jabbering about seeing a
movie that opens next weekend.