The Archetype Trap | Design Club

[music] [music] Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to Oh, that's a problem. Welcome to Design Club. I am your humble design host Will joined as always by my pal Jeff. We are the only show on the internet where Jeff, do you know what really annoying thing happens?
So I go to set up I I set up for this show like a half hour in advance, right? I get everything all set up. I get the dashboard going. I do all of the things. Right. Jeff, what just happened to my YouTube login as we were going? Like as we were
to relo?
Yes. I got kicked out of our dashboard as the show started. So, I can't see if there are any problems because it literally kicked me out of the dashboard as I hit go live. Amazing. Wonderful. Uh we're we're doing the thing.
Well, I see Bull just chatted in live.
Yes. No, we're we're live. That's not the problem. The problem and we've been

live for the appropriate amount of time. The problem is I couldn't see that we were live, so that's cool. Um,
so, uh,
let's let's start again. So, Will, what show is this? What are we doing?
This is Design Club. It's the only game design show on the internet where we have a really scuffed opening because there are tech problems and it's all YouTube's fault. I'm your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff.
Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey, everybody. I am Jeffrey Zatkin, the studio director of Extra Credits and Extra History and longtime game designer, 25 plus years here today to argue with Will in
Yes, we're
collegial and colloquial and civil manner in no way unhinged.
Yes.
About something that he and I when we were discussing topics Tuesday,
yes,
fundamentally disagreed on.
And we might
rather than spend two hours doing it there, we figured we'd spend two hours doing it here.
Yes. And I think fascinatingly we disagree more now than we did then, which is interesting. Uh so I'm uh and

we should we should explain that um I think
I for my talk about before we explain why we disagree,
right? Yeah. I should I should explain that when we do this I think we're both open to the idea that our ideas will be changed and we're not doing this like I will always tell you all when I'm taking a point of view that I don't fully agree with for the sake of making an interesting conversation I am still trying to figure out what I believe here. So, this one is going to be particularly interesting because Jeff is professionally vested very heavily in this for a bunch of very good reasons and I'm personally very invested in this for a whole bunch of personal reasons. So, it's going to be weird. Okay, so this is your warning. This is going to be weird. Please enjoy.
Um, so
I feel like we should start playing the um how it's done intro. You came in a bad time. Crack.

Um. Yeah. Right. So, okay. Let me let me start with a story and then I'll explain how we got to this conversation and then we'll talk. Okay.
Okay.
So, uh this past week, Matt and I wanted to play
You got to say once upon a time. That's how we start stories.
Once upon a time in the kingdom of Twitch, there were two princes, Matt and Will, and they wanted to play a game together. That game was called Fellowship. Fellowship came out last week. They had a bit of a rough launch as most live service games tend to right now because as per usual the hype exceeded their capacity to get servers and because it was their early access launch they didn't have funds to get more servers yet. So now they're scaling up their infrastructure dealing with all the problems while the game is in early access which is always fun. Um but Fellow Fellowship at launch had a problem and the problem was as follows. Fellowship is a game that um is a dungeon running game with four players.

It matchmakes players together and it matchmakes one tank with one healer and two DPS to form a party. Okay, that's the important part. All of the other minutia about fellowship can go out the window because what we're talking today is that concept. And they were having trouble firing Q's because the
What do you mean by firing Q's? uh having they were uh having trouble successfully matchmaking parties and having people run content and play the game. And the problem
because
the problem is that the breakdown of 100% of the player base in the in the queue was as follows. 20% of the player base was playing healer
or queuing as
queuing as healer. Yes.
78% of the player base was queuing as a DPS.
Wait, wait. So 78 plus you said 78
78
plus 20 that's 98%. So that leaves 2% queuing as I'm assuming they don't have

a fill position. So queuing as tank which is one of the three things that excuse me which needs to be 25% for them to basically clear successfully.
Yes. Correct. So and some might argue it's the most rough.
Yeah. Some might argue it's in in that particular game it's the most difficult and important position because they are in charge of routing the dungeon. That's their job as the tank and that's a little difficult for new players. So actually never I'll ask what routing the dungeon in that context means later. But
yeah so and this got us to talking about
originally I think it was why playing tank is less appealing to some people and then we started getting to talk about the trinity right the the trinity that many games though not all games use which is DPS healers and tanks. And at that point, I said to Will, "I'm allowed

to swear on Twitch, right?"
Yeah, you can swear on Twitch.
That's [ __ ] That is a madeup grouping that is actually, in my opinion, bad game design because nobody actually sticks to it. And there is no holy trinity. Like, people talk about it, but only a tiny percent of games use it. They break that rule. And it's a weird setup anyway. And it's good shortorthhand for a couple of things, but it exists purely because some game designers design games around that as opposed to any other outline reason,
right? And there are a bunch of I would say that I think we agree that there are efficiency reasons why one might use them in a game like Fellowship,
but you could also have five positions or two positions. Correct. Or
like it those three that they happen to have picked

are things that they should have designed their game around.
Mhm. if they decided to pick them, but there's no reason that they had to pick them.
Okay. So, so all right. So, we agree that archetypes or groupings of characters are necessary to fire matchmade cues in a variety of games.
No.
Well, only if you design that way. Like,
Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. But like we're we're sort of admitting of games like when when we're talking about the analytical part of this, right? We're focusing largely on games that already have archetypes, right? We're going to be talking
Sure. But like archetypes are weird. Like take League of Legends, which also has had a queueing problem like this,
because what people are queuing for in League is lane positions. you are queuing for top lane, jungle, mid lane, bot lane, damage, support,

right?
Like those are the five things you're queuing for. And when you queue in League, you pick your two primary positions. I want this one or this one. And every once in a while, if it can't matchmate quickly enough, it just says, "Sorry, I know you queued as mid and support, but for this match, you're playing jungle, kid.
Good luck."
And that's their solution. for doing it and like they tamper with it. Like there are some versions of League where if you queue for it, it'll say, "I'm sorry, those two positions you picked, those are the those are currently way overdone. At least one of those has to be one of these two positions which are underdone." Like there are there are lots of technical ways to get around kind of the hard choices, but league, as I said, cues for lane position, not for role. Okay. So, lane position is not an archetype.
And would you say that role is an archetype?
Um,
let let's let's go back one.

It could be,
right? Yeah. Yeah. We're already, by the way, hopelessly off the way we thought this would go, which is great.
Okay. Let's I'm just bringing up that also in addition to them setting up their archetypes in such a way that one grouping of them was so unpopular that only 2% of the people are picking it.
Correct. There are also other ways that they could be managing their cues to get people playing faster.
Correct. They do have a couple of additional problems which they've forced upon themselves, but the point is well taken. We don't need to go deep into the problems of why Fellowship can't flex
Q. Um, actually to finish on this point real quick, League is very interesting in that you can pick what we would call different archetypes within the same lane. Going mid lane, you could be playing a what they call a mage. You could be playing what they call an enchanter. You could be playing what they call an assassin. There even occasionally people who take an ADC mid lane, basically an autoattacking

marksman or excuse me, marksman character. They don't call them ADCs anymore, they call them marksmen. So just because you're going mid doesn't necessitate the role you're playing. There are also if you're playing the jungle role, there are jungles, assassin jungles and tank j like
and this is by the way we're using league here,
not because it's even the most popular because it is the simpler case of the two predominant MOBAs. Dota,
it is also the more popular one than Dota.
Sure, sure. Sure, sure. That's not why I think it's useful here. Um Jeff just likes rubbing that bit in. Dota is so much worse because the concept of role and position
only sort of by the game and community's own admission kind of quasi exist at different and you change roles and positions frequently throughout the game. And it is an absolute mess if you don't play Dota already. So, we're not going to go into that. But before anyone's like, why are you just talking about League and not Dota? Because Dota

is worse for this. Dota is so much worse.
League is easier to understand than Dota. I don't think any almost nobody would nobody argues that point.
No, even the most diehard Dota fans will be like, "Oh yeah, the learning curve is a brick wall and you're going to lose for the first 250 hours, but like it's a great game once you get through the 250 hours of tutorial. Good luck."
Um, [clears throat]
so okay. So,
so, so yeah. So I basically was telling Will that I think the holy trinity is a the holy trinity as opposed as it goes with DPS tank and healer is just a construct and that there's nothing particularly special about it that is just some games glom to that but also they then break those rules almost immediately.
I think that that's fair. So let's I'm trying to like not immediately go into a giant tang it. So,

why do games include archetypes in general? Whether or not they're the trinity.
Mhm. [clears throat]
Right. Let's
say it again. Sorry.
Why do games include archetypes?
Mhm. whether or not those archetypes can be routed back, traced back, um, pointed towards in some direction the Trinity classes or the Trinity archetypes.
So, there's a couple reasons, Will. And a, I'm going to bring up one of your favorite G names.
Yeah, sure.
I think they're genres in a weird kind of way because I know how much we agree on genre as well,
right? I just love that you're taking the opposite point that you take on genre with these. So, like, it's very fun and interesting, but go on. Well, the purpose of a genre is to allow like to say, "Hey, Will, I like shooter games." That gives you a general grouping of characteristics where when you search through your encyclopedic knowledge of games, and I'm like, "Will, I like shooter games. Can you recommend me a shooter?" You're able to sort through those tens of thousands of games, you know, and go to a much

smaller group and they're like, "Oh, I know what Jeff roughly means by this." Or if I'm like, "Hey, I like MOBAs. I like, you know, physics racing games. Like, sure,
by adding a genre or maybe a descriptor or two,
I can help you narrow down from all the things it could be to a thing that is easier to understand. And I feel like the archetypes are set up to do the same kind of thing that if somebody comes into a game, if there's 14 classes to pick from, they're like, well, here's your tanky classes, here's your DPSy classes, here's your healy classes, here's your crowdcontrolly classes, you know, as you start throwing here's your scouty sneaky classes. As you start throwing that in there, people can be like, oh, okay, cool. I wanted to play a sneaky character. I kind of, you know, here are the things I should be looking at more. It's like, oh, weird. that's looks like a mage, but it says it's sneaky. I should check it out anyway where I might have ign So being able to throw kind of archetype things on helps people both pick characters and

particularly for large games with large amounts of players like Warhammer Online or Final Fantasy 14 when you start doing the really big things and get, you know, go from 8 to 24 people or even eight people. If you had to individually know eight different archetypes and balance those versus saying, "Okay, hey, here's a couple of tanky guys. Here's a couple of this. Here's a couple of this." It shortorthhands it to a way that lets players more easily assemble parties or large groups of people and have an idea what they're doing. So that's a couple reasons. Basically, early familiarity and ability to manage large groups of people where there are roles to play.
Okay, I think we can agree on that. So your beef is then not with the idea usefulness of archetypes broadly but rather with the notion that there is something fundamental and um
there's nothing special about what people call the holy trinity.
Okay. Interesting. Okay.

All right. So Okay. Because I super disagree with that which is great. This is this is awesome. We're gonna we're gonna super disagree for the next two hours and it's going to be a lovely time. So obviously there are games in which there is not tanking to be done.
Yes. Or healing,
right? Or or damage
DPSing, right? So, I'd like to take for the for the sake of this discussion, I would like to take the fantasy slash mechanical veneer off of what those archetypes are and talk about their sort of I'm going to say quasi mathematical the way that they actually influence the game.
Okay? because I think that that helps us I think that helps me make my point and I think it helps us get people out of we're talking about just MMOs because I

think it's really easy when we get into this to to be thinking about just MMOs like you you listed a bunch of MMOs and that's fair right MOBAs MMOs hero shooters tend to have very um archetype based matchmaking party composition systems because those are conveniences which allow those developers to get cues to fill, right? To get parties to fill, right? By saying
that's also a small amount of games in the industry.
Sure.
Like we're you're not going to say the holy trinity of prize to Bejeweled or Candy Crush.
Sure. But we're also only going to be like I I think I think we also have to narrow we do we can't talk about every game. I think we have to narrow it down to games which include a group of characters or players
that are attempting to achieve a goal. That's the most that we could ever do, right? So like the the most we could
single player meaning something like a party or a let's even call it a person

with lots of followers or something that has you fielding thing like things like that or a group game where people take on roles for one or in some cases more because there are games where you might control a couple of people but it's still a group game and all those come together.
Yes. Right. Okay.
So I think Yeah.
So so we're okay with that limitation. right? That we're we're not talking about Bejeweled or Candy Crush because obviously those don't admit of this because they're not multiplayer games or they're not they're not group oriented games whether it's single or multiplayer,
right? But even it's weird because you see you see influence on things like that like Slay the Spire is a singleplayer game.
Sure. But ironclad is has an archetype that more resembles say a tanky kind of character like he was made fighter. Defect is a mage. Silence is a thief. Like they're cool takes on it,

but that's kind of their base archetype from you know fantasy dungeons and dragonsy kind of thing. But if you can't reduce the archetype of a game that is wildly popular and does a very good job of approaching things to anything further than two things which vaguely approximate uh two roles of the trinity and a third one which is arguably the hidden fourth branch of the trinity from OG D and D and we could talk about that later. Um, I don't know if that strengthens your point because I feel like
Oh, no. I'm just saying that there there's also influence. So, like some of the things people might say call tanky might actually end up being other things. And tanky can mean different things in different games.
Okay, that's fair. So, for example, in Dungeons and Dragons, the ability to tank is the ability to basically have lots of hit points, be hard to hit, and be able to in some way encourage things

to attack you,
right? The the um uh ancestor spirit barbarian is a great example of this. Has a gajillion hit points at rage and has an ability that says, "If you're not fighting me, you're not fighting well." But it also shows that like D and D has almost no what you would call tanking from say Final Fantasy 14 or EverQuest or other things. The ability to encouate who attacks who is almost entirely absent from Dn D.
Ooh, but
Mhm. I would say that that that the mechanical
that is overmapping
a particular way that tanking is done from a certain genre of games onto the concept of being a tank. And I disagree that that's fundamentally necessary to something being a tank.
Oh, 100%. Because for
that is when we discuss 14 or some of

the other things because for example in League of Legends tanks are good at crowd control. That is one of the things that tanks do in League of Legends. You attack them because otherwise they're going to keep you stunned, knocked back, etc., etc. for a while and you can't actually get to the squishy targets you want to kill. In Dn D, barbarians and fighters don't paladins don't particularly do that. It's more the mages and the sorcerers and the bards who excel in, you know, webs and hypnotic patterns and slow and other stuff. So, groups mix that around a lot too, which is fun
as it should be.
I I agree. I just don't think that
and that gets to the where I think people might say it's a tank, but they then immediately break the archetype or it's a DPS and then they immediately break the archetype. Like it's a it's DPS, but oh wait, they also have some CC and
let's let's back up. Let's back up.

Okay, because I think that now we're getting hung up on what it means to be those archetypes. So, I'd like to step one step back
and talk about what we mean when we say tank, healer, DPS.
And that's the thing, we don't because every
I actually think we absolutely do. We absolutely do. And I will illustrate in this fashion. Okay.
Sure.
So, we are playing the world's most boring game. Are you ready for this
risk? Good try. No, it's very good though. It's very good. I'm going to haul up in Madagascar and I'll see you in three hours. Um, okay.
It's not the most boring. I I enjoyed plenty of games of Risk.
Right. Okay. So, our goal is to through a variety of means mathematically increase our number to a goal value.
Bear with me on this,
okay? And along the way, there will be things which try and stop us getting to

the goal value, right? We have the most basic game theory style. It's not exactly game theory because I don't really want to teach game theory on Twitch or YouTube. Thanks. Um, it's the most we are reducing this to its most fundamental form. We have a value. It's a numeric one. And we have a group of players working towards that goal. Okay,
we can act in several ways towards that goal. Okay, we can and admitting of oppositional forces there are things that are going to happen that may try to reduce our goal number, right? or uh may overcome uh or or may uh provide additional hindrance on our ability to advance the goal number towards the you know we're trying to get to 100 and it may say at 80 this thing happens right okay so there are ways that we can act on it we can we can make number go up

that's a very simple straightforward we're trying to reach a goal we have to make the number go up
okay so I'm playing pinball I have keep hitting
sure
the ball.
There are also there's also the possibility that the number might go down which means that we have two options. We can stop the number from going down or we can repair the number, fix the number, make the number go back up once it has gone down. Is there a third way? Is there a fourth way that we can interact with the notion of advancing towards a goal methodically besides make number go big, stop number from going down, fix number when it does go down?
Um, yeah,
like
we could find route that circumvents need for number. We could cause number to join our side

number from
You're getting too simple.
Why? Because I would argue that what we call tank, healer, DPS are really just um skinned packaged versions of the way that some, again, absolutely not all, some games act on um the idea of having a group of people achieve a goal together. and I can use Rock Band.
I think this gets back to my fundamental argument that if you make a game where that's the entire purpose, some games designed to just those archetypes, but it's an artificial constraint because throw in thief, let's sneak around it. Throw in bard, let's fast talk it so the fight doesn't happen.
Sure. Like if you're if all you're

designing is must manipulate numbers in a fight that purely only matter on do I do damage, do I prevent damage, do I make do I heal damage, then
I will I will remove fighting from my example entirely.
Mhm.
Rock band.
Okay.
Rock band has four roles, right? It has four instruments. It has vocals, guitar, bass, and drums. They all serve different
um sub roles within the band, right? They
tell me more.
Okay, great. Excellent. Awesome. You have um several groups which lead in making score go up, right? Everyone makes score go up.
Yep. But some some jobs inexurably make job go up faster because they play more notes and those notes are worth points and that's how you score,

right? Traditionally that's the vocalist and the guitarist. Okay. You have uh sometimes it's the drummer. It depends on
drummers may do more interaction than either of those two because they're hitting multiple different
it okay I will fully
okay I'm not quite sure where you're going with this but carry on
there is a job in rock band and I know it's my favorite job and I play support in every game that whose job it is to remain steady and to fix problems when they start happening when the when the band starts failing out of the song that's the basis job The basist's job is to do something incredibly boring until they they are needed to get people back on track and back into the song.
What do you do when actually I'm really
the basis star power has the ability to get people back on track?
Can't everybody use star power?
They can, but bases tend to have more of it
just because of the way that basis works.
Okay.

I don't I look I don't I it didn't come with a full dossier on the the analysis. It's an interesting example. I'm trying to understand.
My point my point right is that you are using the language of fights and what I am saying is that I only I not only disagree with you to the extent that I think that there is something about the trinity that maps strongly to most roles in most games that include the ideas of archetypes in fighting. I will go one further and say that if we remove the fighting veneer from those archetypes that those archetypes are seen in other games that do not involve combat.
Okay. So, wait. So, who's the healer and who's the tank in Rockband?
I would loosely argue that uh and again, we're not going to get into the minutia on this, but like go with me on this. The basis is the healer, the tank is the uh drummer, and the other two are DPS. That's my loose argument.
The tank attracts aggro.

I [snorts] mean, the drummer attacks
No, because aggro is only involved if we're playing.
So, the drummer keeps
the drummer plays
number from going down
number. Yes, correct. The because they're the one that keep
I completely don't see it.
Okay, that's that's fine. I I can we're not going to derail and let me make like the full argument about how like having the drummer keep everyone on track is the same as tanking, but like
that's an argument or we can look at sports. Let's look at sports.
Sure. I was actually going to bring it up.
Okay, cool. Soccer
before before chat or excuse me before we started you asked some like, "Hey, think of a game with a group of characters where there are archetypes
y
that don't map to the holy trinity."
Yep.
Madden.
Yeah. like straight up a group of characters
with archetypes
Uhhuh.
that in no way map to the Holy Trinity. [snorts]
Okay.
So, you have a bunch of Oh, god. This is

This is This Why did we pick Madden? I was going to use soccer, but sure, we can use the game I know nothing about cuz I hate football. No, it's fine. Um, so, all right. in Madden, right? You have
linemen and and by the way, we're gonna have to admit that multiple characters in a group can map to um can that can map to individual uh roles, right? Like we have to admit of the idea that in a group of more than four people or more than three people, you could have multiple tanks, multiple DPS, multiple
I guess part of what we [clears throat] have to be careful of here
is that we're not leaving out other roles. In other words, if we if it looks like we only have three things and we're trying to shove everything into those, that leaves open the possibility that there are many other roles.
I agree.
Which we are ignoring because we're trying to shove everything in or specifically you're trying to shove everything into those three. I would say that they are subdiv they are occasionally subdivided but that we

still have at its root people that stop us from losing, people that fix mistakes and people that advance us towards a goal and that everyone does all of those things. He if it is basically make number go down, make number go up, keep number from going up or down or mitigate,
then not really. Or you take a game like Starcraft, there's lots of units with roles. They don't map to
Does Starcraft qualify for our conversation, though?
Because I've already I've already knocked out Pokemon. I preemptively knocked out Pokemon in Discord because that one gets really weird. And also
all of those are [laughter]
Pokemon's not a good fit. Pokemon out.
Yeah, Pokemon's not a good fit. If you're if you're there, you know, there's they they

define roles in there or classes, you know, ground, flying, infantry, um, organic, non-organic. I mean, um, they there are a lot of different You're a game with a group of characters you control.
Okay.
RTS zombies. A game with a group of characters you control. Plants. Mhm.
that you put down. Like there are lots of games with groups of characters you control that don't map to
like Plants Versus Zombies maps more than say Starcraft.
Sure.
Because there are ways to heal your damaged plants.
But even there are also other roles that are getting that are getting taken in there.
I'm going to be so reductive with Starcraft for a second.
Sure. and RTS's in general, but I'll stick with Starcraft because it's what we're on.
All of Starcraft, 100% of Starcraft boils down to the

economy. RTS's are all fundamentally economy games, which means that it is a game about two lines.
It's a very dressed up game about two lines, but it is a game about two lines. My economy line and your economy line.
And that I have units that make my economy line go up. I have units that make your economy line go down. And I have units that uh prevent you from effectively reducing my economy line more than yours.
And I have units that scout, I have units that build other units.
Sure. But do are you not doing all of those things in the service of either increasing your own economy or damaging mine?
No, not necessarily. I think again that's reductive. you're reducing to three roles when there are plenty of others. I
because you can shoehorn almost any game into sure here's the things that you know deal damage. Here's the things that

but a lot of like Starcraft has almost no healing. Like if you're saying it is healer tank support, Starcraft has almost no tanking like
it has units which are tankier and also has base defenses which I would say fill the role of
sure units that are tankier is not
I I would I would divide Starcraft up weirdly. I would say that your, as weird as this sounds, um, all units
that are not economy generating units are DPS, base defenses and bases are tanks, and like literally SCVs, probes, uh, drones for Zerg, right? Drones. Yeah. Okay. Not losing my mind. Um, are the things that fill the support/heer role,
right? But then take something like an observer, which is basically it's a scout. Like scouting is a big role in RTS's. Same as like thief in first

edition Dn D. So again, you can shoehorn things into Trinity, but there are plenty of other roles that are needed and make these games work and that they would not work without those games. I still I I think I am going to stick to my guns and say that scouting in this case is a force multiplier on your ability to accomplish your goal. It is just another avenue. Information is a strong
blood what archetype is an observer. It's not a tank. It's not a healer and it's not a DPS.
Oh, it absolutely is a DPS because it direct information is a way that you
Oh, no. No.
Yes, it is. Information is a way that you do damage to your enemies do zero damage. They have no attacks.
They provide you with the ability to do damage by observing. If I can't call in,
that is that is stretching your definition.
I don't I don't I don't think it is.
Well, again, see, you're falling back to your fundamental thing. It's like Matt's abolish everything lectern thing. It's

like you have to believe me. I'm standing behind a lectern. It's like you have to believe it. It can fall. It can influence this one archetype. But I think that you are uh overly resistant to this because you don't believe that it can be done. And so when I point out the fundamental nature of the
I think it can I think there are games that have perfectly balanced those three things. I'm just saying they're exceedingly rare and that most games don't have them and that most games that do and think they do break their rules all the time.
I actually think that every game that includes them does because I don't think that they actually fun. like we're going to get to a point here. I'm going to say that they exist and that they are um the fundamentals around which we build archetypes, but that no they are the extremes of a threepointed graph at which no unit can ever occupy the most extreme edge of any of them. There is no
I also by the way fundamentally disagree with your it really comes down to make number go up make number go down

prevent number sure
because at the end of the day again if you're coming back to the archetype when I'm like will do you want to play a healer or tank or a DPS
you are okay maybe you but 99% of the people aren't thinking my job is make number go up they're thinking cool I'm going to be casting healing spells and shielding spells and Maybe I'm going to be scaring away undead and you know there are things that are associated with the archetype and how it feels and how it plays because again we're going back to why do we have the archetype? It lets people know roughly the set of things that you're going to be doing.
I agree with that. I'm simply saying that your argument that they don't that they are an arbitrary and um unnecessary contrivance is not true. That's my fundamental argument. I think we agree on there is no such thing as a game which perfectly implements the trinity. I agree that

overly uh adhering to the notion of the trinity is bad and doesn't lead to good gameplay. And we'll get to all of these here in a second. Um
I agree that um there are things which blend and do not obviously conform to one point of the trinity. I just think that you you say that they are outside of that. I say that they are between them. Right? Because in my mind, right, we can put all characters in a two-dimensional triangular grid and map them to some combination millu.
We could even make it a pyramid if we really needed to to like get the threedimensionality or whatever in. But that there is a fundamental understanding to the way that games work when it concerns a group of people achieving an objective that has the bones of make number go up, stop number from going down, fix number when number screws up in it.
And again, I just I think you're being very reductive.

No, I think I'm dealing with the pro I think and again, I'm not
I think you're leaving out huge aspects of gameplay. Like take fifth edition Dn D.
Uhhuh. All the there are three pillars that they identify as being part of Dn D. Combat is one, exploration is one, and social is one.
Uhhuh.
But we consider the three pillars that the game is based on.
Sure. And so that there is room for the, you know, fasttalking bard in the socials and the interaction and the intimidation and the exploration with the scouting and survival and the strategic planning that goes around all of that in addition to the part the combat.
Sure.
And so if the only thing you're measuring on are those three things, you're missing all of these other parts of the game. And what's the name of the game? Fellowship. Fellowship.
Fellowship is interesting because they're removing like they're going in

they're chopping out all of these other parts and they're saying all that we're centering on is this dungeon run. Yeah. So for them like it makes more sense to like it's like cool. You are not doing the social. You are not doing the exploration. Well you are but you're not doing the exploration in the way that we see it in other games.
Right.
I'm assum are the dungeons random and instanced. The dungeons are instance though not random. They are all like at each difficulty level. They are known and you can match them.
So in other words, you can go online, look up the dungeons. So you don't need that part of exploration.
Yes. Yeah. There's no Yeah. There's no like fog of war like you can mouse over and see the whole map
for a game like that.
It is much more something that could play to that archetype, but I've almost or that set of archetypes. So, we can discuss whether that's a useful grouping or not in a minute, but I've almost never seen another game that doesn't have all of these other parts of gameplay as well that aren't covered by the little
right

over here,
right? And and uh for an example, right, in in um in WoW, right, which is a game that Fellowship draws heavily from, but is much larger and has other things like raids, there are utilities that things which fit into which are called DPS, healers, and tanks. There are utilities which those bring which are of additional value. For instance, Warlock's portal, right, is of additional nondirect DPS value
to to the thing.
Crafters,
right? Yeah.
Like there's a whole bunch of parts of that game
like you could be a you could be a paladin that is also a crafter.
Sure. I have unironically years ago referred to crafting um max HP food for my raid as preemptive healing, but like that's neither here nor there. That's mostly because it's I'm the healer and it's much easier to heal you if you have more HP. But that's like your point is taken, right? That like
that there are whole other parts of the

game. Like an interesting thing is first edition Dn D there were four not quite archetypes but like the it was based around the fighter, the mage, the wizard, and at that point they were called the thief.
Yeah. And those were kind of the four classes that you were supposed to have in a party that held it up because first edition was lot a lot more survival rogueesque than current D and D is. And so having a character that could scout and backstab and pickpocket even though they did it horribly at low levels. Like first edition thieves were just
bad.
So gimped.
They were very bad. They're not good. Um
but I I also think
they also threw in things like the monk which you're like wait
where does he go?
I also think that we are coming at this from two different angles and I think that and I think that chat largely agrees with you on the angle that we're

coming that you're coming from and I totally understand why my point isn't landing.
You are largely coming at this from a um game first analytical examplebased orientation. Right. you are you are correctly I think for your point of view pointing at things that don't work and I am trying I think unsuccessfully to philosophically consider what it means for something to be a game without actually existing like I'm thinking of an a priori game which might be the first time that I've unironically used the phrase a priori on this channel in like the seven years I've been here so
okay you have to tell people What a priori means
a priori means without reference to experience. So it means that geometry is true a priori. Geometry does not need an experiment to prove that it is true. It is logically and rigorously true in a

void that in which no human has experience. You can logic your way into all of Uklid's geometry if you accept his fifth postulate. And we can argue about that later. um without experiencing anything just using pure logic. I'm trying to get to the behind the thing and I don't think I'm going to be able to do that. So, I will I will say that for the sake of our time, um I don't think I'm going to be able to convince you, but nor am I convinced that there is not a math layer beneath a lot of the assumptions that we make in game design that like there is what it means for something to be a game with a goal. And I think that that I will need time to craft an appropriate appropriately convincing argument of.
And part of it is too. So like I let me

state part on your side. I fundamentally think you could build a game balanced around three archetypes that you label as DPS, healer, and tank.
Yeah. I think that that would also be in some cases people still but even if you did people still wouldn't understand it because they might say I want to be a sneaky character. Who should I play? I want to be a crowdcontrolly character.
I will I will even go further and say that such a game would be beyond mind-numbingly boring and no one would play it. That the game that I am talking about that is is beyond the veneer. Right. If we have a game that has a pure tank, a pure healer, and a pure DPS is not worth playing, and is boring as sin because
actually the time it would be the most interesting.
Yes.
Let me let me throw you a life well, not a lifeline. Let me throw you where I think it would be the most interesting.
A single player game where you're playing a party.
Yes.

In other words, if you are controlling four or five characters, all of whom conform to this very strict archetype.
Yep.
You're going to be like, "Cool." You know, I have my two B DPS, my two tanks, and my healer in my party.
Yep.
Tanks are going to, you know, this is a strategic game. Tanks are going to march up to the front, block access where my melee DPS will be between them getting shielded. My archer DPS will be sitting back or, you know, mage will be sitting back throwing spells and my healer will be sitting there making sure that people like it as a singleplayer experience. It's turning those into basically tools that you are you
right. They're elements
individual tool bags.
They're elements of your holistic approach that are manifested in characters which you choose to become part of your party.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But like it's weird like say you're playing Final Fantasy Tactics Will. Yes. And you're like
I'm gonna play White Mage because White Mage does heal heal heal.

Sure.
And buff and soul.
Right. No. Yeah. Right. No. Like even the most Okay, so if you're if you're watching this later on YouTube, like we have to admit that even the things that we put on the thumbnail don't fit, right? White Mage learns holy,
right? Caitlyn has traps. Those are not DPS. Those are a kind of tanking. Right.
All right. Well, the traps is specifically a form of crowd control, which in your example probably falls into tanking, even though I also disagree with the and her net,
which does some damage, pushes her backwards, out of the way of things, and slows down the person hit.
Yes.
And Reinhardt
is afy dude, but he's also going to kick your butt if you don't do something about him.
Correct. Yeah. So, okay. So let's um I I also uh Suma over on YouTube chat is brought up um a very interesting point that I want I want to go to your point that like these are not real. So classes

are almost all the same relative to other classes of their role. Completely disagree I as savage raider and 14 completely disagree and there's an important reason why right none of the jobs in any MMO and I especially will include 14 are
Keep going on your 14. I'm are ar are um pure archetypes, right? Healers are required to do damage. It's necessary to clear every enrage in the game at the savage and ultimate level. Some exes even the healers need to be doing damage. The tanks do damage, right? And some of them have other utility, right? Um the paladin can heal. They heal themselves. That is kind of tanking but also kind of not, right? And we have DPS that do provide healing utility. Summoner, Pictomancer, uh, Dancer, all provide healing. Every DPS class has some kind of self-migation and self-healing, right? They are not archetypes and they're not all equivalent, right? Ask Ask the uh, let's

see, machinist, summoner, dragoon, um, I don't know, pick your other melee reaper party versus the samurai black mage, uh, dancer picto party, right? They are not all equivalent. Um, and that's important because if they were equivalent, it would suck, right? Perfectly balanced games and games which adhere too strongly to archetypes. And I think we absolutely agree on this are boring, right? Because it is in breaking those archetypes, it is in the space between the archetypal points, right? That we find interesting things, right? And let me actually tell you about a really interesting design exercise that I participated in. I think it was 24 years ago.
Mhm.

So EverQuest EverQuest had been out for a couple of years and we were starting the design for EverQuest 2
because nobody thought games lasted more than a couple of years. So, the thing you did was you made a sequel.
Well, did I just get louder?
No.
Okay,
it's just you.
You're also locked down, so you can't get too loud here, but keep going.
That's [clears throat] good. Anyway, so um one of the problems EverQuest had was that there were there was a party size of six and there were 14 classes. And some classes, probably rightly so, felt that they were not as valuable to a party as other classes were. And this is ignoring raids and other things because 98% of at least the first couple the game plus the first couple expansions was party based. Like there were raids, but bigger and bigger raids came on later. And so, for example, the cleric was

straight up the best healer.
Mhm. Druids and shamans were really good were actually more efficient over time with hots and some other things. But if you needed somebody to heal quickly, it was the cleric. If you needed damage done the quickest from mage cer, it was a wizard. Necromancer's enchant like the best CC was the enchanter.
Bards had the best utility like but at a certain point people were like we need pretty much always an enchanter in the party because of the crowd control. Sure.
And so one of the things that as we were talking about the design for EverQuest 2 back when I was still in the team before I moved to another teams and eventually left to go head up a game at a whole different studio was a concept that um Brad had uh McQuade, our producer had pitched, which was what if there were only four classes you could pick from at the beginning and then you got to pick specializations when you hit certain levels. And he and

the idea was that if you needed a cleric, any cleric would do. We looked was like what does a cleric fundamentally do? You know, it has the heal, it has the res. So if you went cleric then to priest or shaman to druid and then you subbed, you know, from druid down to the specialty below that later, they would still have all the fundamental abilities that cleric did. And the same if you picked a warrior class whether it was you know fighter or ranger you know pal whatever it was barbarian actually barbarian was a race but um yeah it was anyway um sorry it's been a long time since I designed that game you know they would have the taunt they would have the damage absorption all of the rogue types would have the backstab and the sneaky and the unlocks all the mages would have a certain amount of card control and damage and that they pick their flavor but what that would mean is in a party, you know, at mid levels when people like, "We need a healer." Any cleric that you'd pick, you

wouldn't be like, "Hey, I'm a druid. I'm getting left out of all this."
Yeah.
Right.
And I think it had middling success. Like I left well before the game was finished. But it was kind of an interesting thought on how do we do that in an area where there's going to be more classes than the party size allows and not penalize people for picking that kind of thing.
Yes.
And so like these debates have gone on for a long time and you know for us back then rogue or sneak
was still one of the four fundamental archetypes. They were also heavy DPS,
but that set of skills they came with were essential to how you played that game,
right? Because you had a bigger emphasis on exploration in fog of war, right?
And honestly on um we it was called pulling, which was there's a lot of mobs over there. How do we get a couple of them to come attack us without getting the whole bunch to do that?
Right.
And classes that could ambush, scout, and get monsters to chase you over to

where your party would murder them. something that has been moved over time into the idea of tanking was originally its own separate
skill set.
Skill set that belonged to a different archetype.
Yes.
Cool. I dig.
And so like that's part of the evolution in the same way that like when I first started playing League of Legends and saw that their tanks did the crowd control, I was kind of astounded but then thought, "Oh, that makes sense." Because they were looking for ways to make you want to go hit the tank without only doing you must attack me,
right? Because uh League, when we're talking about this, we also have to admit that League has a big bump, which is that the aggro table needs to be a psychological concept because you are dealing with another player and not with an NPC that has an aggro table, right? So like that is one of the things that's interesting about League in this example is that it needs to find a way that encourages you to be attacking the tank

but doesn't enforce you attacking the tank and take away [clears throat] player
kind of like D and D in some cases like there are very few things that you can do that the fighter can do that says dragon you must attack me
right
and it's up to the dungeon master to play basically the monster and the intelligence of the monster to kind of do that and is for all sorts of different games.
Yeah. Well, and and and that's why like even the even the barbarian we were talking about earlier, right? That that doesn't enforce you attacking them. It just imposes a penalty if you don't,
right?
And that's also one of the few ones that does like it is un inarguably for the original fifth edition that particular subclass of barbarian is one of the best tanks in the game because of that one ability. Correct. Yeah, I I I picked a spiky thing. I'm still trying to make my point, Jeff. I'm pick I'm gonna pick spiky examples. But yes, that is that is definitely true that the other sort of tankier like war

cleric war cleric can take damage all day. By the way, like any of the heavy armor cleric things can just stand in front and not die forever. That doesn't mean they're going to get people to attack them, but they can do the stand in front and not die forever thing. all as soon as they cast um not oh shoot not spiritual wealth it's the third level um the third level area of effect damage spell that clerics get now that's amazing
I don't know I haven't looked at D&D in since the last time we ran a one shot and I only looked enough to answer questions
thank you hold on I got
yeah yeah spirit guardians yeah
oops hold on wrong I hit the wrong thing where did it go there we go cuz then they can stand there in their plate mail on their shield with their AC20 doing damage to everything around them and be like, "Yeah,
you got to hit me or this is just going to keep going,
right?" Yeah. And then I have to fail my concentration check, which is not going to happen. So, have fun.
Yeah.
Yeah. But, and again, this kind of gets

me back to that like there are ways to build games to go to any set of archetypes. There is a popular one which is tank healer DPS, but I also think you can build games to hit many more groupings of abilities that are important to how your game is done.
Let me let me give you a freebie, Jeff.
Oo, I like that.
We talked about how Dota 2 is too complicated. I'm going to make it complicated. To Jeff's point, Dota 2 has functionally 12 archetypes. [laughter]
12.
12. Here they are. can play.
Uhhuh. Uh-huh. Five.
How many players can we on a team?
Five.
Okay. Just checking.
So, so there are there are two axes uh on which we we do these uh there are only two
one in each hand.
Uh yeah, exactly correct. Axe, two blades, extra close shape. We have carry support and oddly and specifically for Dota 2, we have carry support. You could be both. Then we have the four stats

which are strength, agility, intelligence, and the weird fourth one, universal, which means I get to pick which stat is my primary stat based on which stat is my highest stat at the particular moment. And I can use all of them. It's very weird. This all depends. If you've never played Dota and you're looking at this like I'm you're looking at me like I'm crazy. take league and expose all of the stats behind the stats that you see and imagine that they're all rooted in core stats and that's Dota. It's very weird. It's very strange.
Where are we going with this?
So, you can have any number. You can have any combination of carry support carry support with any one of the four um stat arrangements and each of them plays differently and uniquely. There are four 12 archetypes.
Okay.
So, you can select for them, right? And you might now or you can, if you prefer,

you can look at the nine sliding scales that Dota provides you for what a character does and is.
Um, but either way, it's got more than four, right? It's got more than five. So, as it like I definitely agree that there are ways that you can build games that include more archetypes or include more um maybe this is the thing we should talk about then. If if you were boiling archetypes down to basically number go up, number go down, try and make number not do the thing to say that there are more axes worth measuring than just the number. And that brings in some of the other on different games.
I agree from a gameplay design perspective to build a successful game. Yes.
But when we're
I'm speaking as a game designer.
Yeah. No, absolutely. I 100% agree with that. I think where we begin to disagree is when we get back to

like the again this thought experiment of what it means for a game. Like you are being eminently practical in a commendable fashion, right? There's no question about that.
That is what game designers need to
correct. I'm dealing with this
practical game designers don't make good games.
It's true. No, that's very true. I'm Jeff, I need you to understand that I'm dealing with this as a game philosopher, man. Like, no, but like there's an like
that's our fundamental [laughter] disagreement.
Correct. No, which I think is good. Right. And I think this also, if you're joining us for this episode specifically, and it's one of your first, I think this really showcases the places where Jeff and I disagree the most in a very interesting way, which I'm enjoying immensely. That like there that those things are true and ancillary to what makes a thing a game, not a good game, not an excellent game, not an award-winning game, not a game that sells, not a game that'll sell and fund the studio. a game, right? I'm like one

step back, right? Which is fine because I think you're and I think everything you've said is true from a practical consideration when we're designing games. But I also think that there's a layer below this that's like [snorts] really boring for most people. And to be honest, I don't delve in it usually um because I would much rather deal with the practical considerations of games and scream about accessibility. That's another one of my big things in gaming. Um, but I do think that there is like this abstraction layer below.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm snacking on this one.
Yeah. And as I said, I just there are other val part of making a game interesting is realizing that there are other axes that are worth exploring, you know, like and like saying, "Oh, here's a crowd control class. Here's a scouty class. here's a crafty class, you know, here there are and in some cases like what

were we talking we were talking I want to get to some of the examples because
Yeah. No, I I do want to I do want to just real quick ask you to say more about including crafters in this
like what what how does that relate given that many characters can be both a crafter and another combat class, right? Because I do think that while these things are like you were also addressing that there are social aspects to D and D, a fact which I do not dispute and I completely agree with. But it is while you might have a synthetic situation, a combination of many ideas that is a combat um social situation, right? Aka the bard needs to convince someone of something whilst swashbuckling on a table. Hold on, I need to write this down. This makes for a great scene. Anyway, um uh like I agree that those can exist. The we also look at each part of that as its

own like successor like each of those is its own part of a bigger game, right? Just like MMOs often suffer from bloat, right? Because they've got 10 billion mini games and subsystems and whatever because they've been running for too long and whatever, right? But those aren't the we consider each of those differently individually and then we look at them together, right? So, could you say more about including crafters in this because I'm not sure I follow where you're going.
Sure. So, say you're looking at, say you've made a game called Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition. Sure.
And you said the three things we care about
are combat, exploration, and social interactions. And we are going to design our game around supporting those three concepts. And each of our characters classes that we design are going to interact with those more or less for each one.
But it's going to all classes will interact with all of those facets to

some degree, even if it is a slight one.
All classes will have to by playing the game of Dungeons and Dragons, you will have to explore. You will have to have social encounters. You will have to have combat encounters. Yes,
you could theoretically run a game without them, but they're saying this is how it is balanced.
Yes.
Excuse me. Not this is how it is designed,
constructed.
And so you can, for example, pick a class that more heavily interacts with the combat part of the game, one of its three pillars. But you could also have a character that chooses to more heavily based on your design of them and the classes more heavily interact with the social or the exploration or a combination. You could for example say I am picking a lorebard. I'm going to be doubling down on some of the exploration and the social and my interaction with combat may or may not be less or higher based on the

spells I pick.
Right?
Where you could also pick a rogue who says, "Oh, I'm also going for the exploration and the social in a different way and I also still have my, you know, sneak attack and other things. I can participate in combat." But you might get a champion fighter who's like, I'm here for the combat. I'm going to roll in and I am not in all specs for exploration or social. But you could be like D and D let you take pieces of that. And so whether you are a tank, a healer, or a DPS
is important for one aspect of those, but even within the combat, the exploration that the rogue does might be their contribution to part to set up the ambush for the combat. So this is talking about multiacetly balancing a game around different kinds of things so that when you get to each part certain characters like ah this is where I step in and take

more of the lead and other people say I step back
and that happens the same in combat. There are people in combat who are like, "Cool, I'm going to sit back here and give inspiration, cast my occasional healing word, and use vicious mockery, you know, and that is my, you know, low-key interaction with combat because this isn't what I'm interested in." And so, you can design games basically around different aspects. And so crafting for me is saying in the same way that multiple characters in Dn D might be good at exploration, multiple characters in World of Warcraft or any other MMO or game might be good at crafting or I've bought a whole bunch of stuff so I'm good at the auction house or transportation or all sort like there are other aspects around things you can do.
I agree that there are other aspect gathering as opposed to crafting.

Sure.
Like there there are other aspects of gameplay that are interesting.
I agree with that. I also think that when we talk about those, we're talking about different axes of the game, right? that that my the only thing that needs to be balanced between my crafter and my combat class is that the result of my crafting needs to be balanced when considered with the overall state of combat,
right? That we're not
Whoops. Ah, wrong click. I I want to answer a question real quick before we go far away from this just to finish.
So, other than Ranger and Rogue, what characters are good at exploration? Well, you can any character with expertise can basically get good at stealth.
Sure.
Um, you could also take an armor with stealth armor if you're going for exploration. You could take a wizard with flying invisibility or sorcerer. There's a lot of ways that you can help with the exploration. You can be a druid and wild shape to go checking things

out. And in addition to wild shaping, now summon your own familiar to scout with you. So almost not every class, but many classes give the ability to dabble or excel in each of those three pillars based on how much you want to do it and how you build your character because building for that might also mean that you're not as good at other pillars,
right? And so I think this is a good point for us to pivot into like the the the part that I think we agree on the most,
right? which is that I'm absolutely down to say that Jeff's point that a character needs to be multi-dimensional is true, right? That that is a that is a um relevant uh practical detail, right? Is that characters need to be multifunctional. And I'll also say that one of the biggest dangers that applies to games that have archetypes is that overdoing those archetypes and specifically overdoing the trinity makes the game worse and definitely makes the

character that you're designing to do that thing worse. Right. And I I think that this is important because while while we've had a lot of suggestions about games that treat archetypes interestingly, I [clears throat] also don't think that anyone can provide us with an example of a game that is entirely built around having characters or classes or ideas that fully conform to any of the archetypes, even the nontrinity archetypes that are present. isn't in that game, right? In every in every game that has tanks, tanks do damage.
In every game that has uh healers, healers can also do damage. Sometimes they don't, but they can,
right? Uh isn't it shadow priest? One of the priests in WoW does the like I do damage to this person to heal someone else. I turn it into a healing battery, right? Like
drain tanking or drain healing.

Drain healing, right? or um that it is important to remember that when we're talking about archetypes, we are also beginning like we need to move between the space that I'm trying to occupy and the space that Jeff is trying to occupy, which is we need to move from like this place of like the theoretical cold analysis of like what is the purest form of this idea into a practical one, right? And I do think that that is like really important to hammer home here, right? that everything has to move out of its extreme archetypal like inception and furthermore that tank man, healer man, DPS man are bad ways to start designing characters, right? That having a concept and then figuring out how it applies to the combat system makes much more sense, right? For instance, in 14, Dark Knight exists. Dark Knight in previous Final Fantasy games is a

Oh, different. Not Batman.
No, not
um Dark Knight is an extremely edgy character who's largely focused on sacrificing their own health pool to do damage, right? They are largely a damage based character in other Final Fantasy games. In 14, they're classified as a tank. Does that mean that they don't do things that are extremely edgy and blood magic related and summoning the darkness from inside their own soul to like become a literal manifestation of edge lord and do damage to things? No, of course not. They absolutely do all of that. Is there is there um all their uh they have an invulnerability that requires them to die. They have to die in order for their involve to go off. It's literally called living dead. It's completely edge lorded, right? But that's a that's a concept first that got slid into an archetype loosely, right?
And that to me is why I was arguing when we first started that like I don't think

the archetypes exist in any meaningful way because sure dude does tanky stuff, but he also does all of this other stuff. So that if you're trying and I what I was saying people break the rules immediately
because yes there may be a theoretical um pure form of it but that would be so boring that nobody builds it
because you want to go do your damage, you want to go do your crowd control, your healing or your scouting or you know all of the other fun things around there. And so people can build and maybe actually let me throw you some. People can build towards an archetype and good designers do because again saying that's a tanky guy, that's a scouty guy, that's a crowdcontrolly guy kind of thing. Help people understand what they're getting into and form groups together. But again, it should be a loose it's an it's

not a platonic ideal. It's a loose set of
correct
a lot of the abilities tend towards tank. But here's some other cool stuff,
right? I think it's this is a tanky guy who,
right? And that who statement is the difference between overindexing on the on the archetype and using the archetype to guide design in a way that yields an interesting thing. This is a DPS who partners with another damage dealer and supports their damage as well as the damage of the entire party and can provide shields and damage mitigation and healing.
Cloak and dagger.
Dancer.
Dancer. Okay.
Dancer in Final Fantasy 14 has the lowest per
Oh, sorry. I was thinking Marvel Rivals.
Yeah, but also a good one. I play I main C and D when I play Rivals, though I haven't played rivals in a long time. CND is a good example, right? And that they have damage amplification on a healer, which is great by the way. CND is great. Um, but in the same like so the who, right, the who statement, the this is a DPS that or who, right? The

modifier statement is what makes it interesting and what enables the buyin. And you can argue whether the buyin or the archetype should come first. But both of them are equally important to making a synthetic hole that works because either one on their own sort of falls apart
because if you have something that like and and and I think part of the problem here is that for very few players in team games um outside of D and D and I'll fully admit the D and D is weird. very seldom are jack of all trades, jobs, classes, characters rewarded heavily because generally speaking, you're trying to be the best at something and being second best at a bunch of things rarely accomplishes what you need. Enter barge and that's a whole different yeah conversation. I say there are games that actually reward utility because for example utility could be another access

that we measure against and like for me like being having literally created the crowd control style class.
Mhm. Like to me crowd control is its own axis. Like I understand the modern meshing of crowd control and tank, but I also understand the meshing of crowd control and healer or the crowd control and damage deal. I think part of the I think one of the problems that we're running into is that more modern games have chosen to eskeew complex crowd control in favor of um uh responsive crowd control. That is to say, instead of having I put down a zone of silence, they have, oh, this enemy spellcaster is casting a spell and you can see that they're casting a spell because of the way that they are. Someone who has a I'm going to punch them in the throat button should press the I'm going to punch them in the

throat button, which is one of the difficulties, right? Because I've never grown I've never existed at the same time period as a game where crowd control was like the primary thing, right, that a class that I wanted to play did. Even in DN like, and that's partially because I shy away from that, right? Like,
and honestly, I don't think we've ever had another enchanter since I made one. I think EverQuest stands well EverQuest was also
mindboglingly complicated. I've looked I've looked at playing EverQuest on stream with Jeff by the way. That's and and we're not going to because
games have evolved. Games should evolve over the decades.
Yeah.
Oh,
I want to throw so quick and can I not click on a thing again?
Yeah. Oh, so again and like B said, what's the purpose of utility though? Either damage mitigation, resource generation. It really depends again what the game is going for. There are games

that basically switch around objectives rapidly and in that case is having a strong utility character. Somebody can say, I'm not the best at anything, but because we're playing a game where we need to do this, then we need to do this, then we need to do this. Having somebody who can help all aspects of that as high utility can be super useful.
Let let me give you a stellar example that's incredibly relevant to upcoming event.
This Saturday for charity, we'll be playing Deep Rock Galactic, a game about four dwarves trying to mine things in a sci-fi environment. And you all will be able to summon bugs in order uh by giving money to charity. There will be big gribly bugs and you can summon them. I will be playing the scout.
Jeff, the scout is a utility character. Let me tell you what the scout's abilities are.
I have a limited ability to do damage
with a gun and a shotgun, but my grenades do no damage and merely apply a slow to all enemies caught within. It's

crowd control.
My uh flares, my light sources last longer. And one of my primary utility abilities is to launch flares into the ceiling or walls to illuminate the space so that other people can fight. And my mobility ability, it's a grappling hook. I'm one of the the scout is one of the fastest characters. So my job is to go scoop up people who are down and provide light. And occasionally, if I have time, throw bullets at enemies. But most of the time, my job is make sure everyone has enough light to see and the gunner doesn't murder everyone by shooting blindly into the dark. and moving quickly. Right. So to your point, there are utility things that are not that are they might in my like incredibly abstract filed off like most base platonic form version map to that. But I will also admit that it's incredibly difficult [snorts] even for me to see that mapping. Right? I'm not saying that they do or don't. I'm saying that they

could. Right? and that the the utility to Jeff's point is a different kind of thing, right? And I would also say that DRG absolutely participates in archetypes because you have four extremely different archetypal characters and we can argue about how the four characters do the thing on Saturday, but like
again, archetypes aren't bad. They help players identify roughly what they're going to be doing in the game.
Yeah. Um what was um wait which MMO was that? Um Elder Scrolls you were telling me.
Yeah. So ESO doesn't have a firm um Elder Scrolls Online
it's a skill node based system right
kind. Yes kind of it does. Okay. So, Elder Scrolls Online is my pitch is, "Hey, what if your Skyrim character could play Skyrim with three other people? Enjoy." I'm not kidding, by the way. That's like the best pitch for it. It has an incredibly complicated skill

system where the armor and weapons that you're using and the class that you are combined to give you a list of skills you can choose some from. And then it has a skill node system. But it's complicated enough that the way that they do tanking and healing is you get to say what you are and then do it. I'm not kidding. When you you declare what you're queuing as when you quue for a dungeon you
because for some reason they mapped the trinity onto that. You quue as damage tank or healer despite the fact that it's not a game that has damage tanks or healers. And that because most people play solo most of the time, if you built yourself purely as a healer, you'd have a really miserable time in the game, the same as if you were pure DPS or pure tank,
because you need to be able to do all of those and other abilities. Yes.
As well.
So, for instance, one of the better healer classes, the warden,

has a bunch of abilities that can be used for healing and also summons a bear. [laughter] And the bear is like indestructible. and just malls people, right? So, like you can do all kinds of healing and stuff, but also there's a bear following you around like so, uh, it does they don't map and it's an entire MMO that doesn't that like has the veneer of the trinity but doesn't need it, right? Guild Wars 2 also, uh, I would be remiss if I didn't bring this up, um, only vaguely participates in this because they're, um, they similarly have a what weapon are you using plus what class you are sort of skill system. Um, and characters are much more self-reliant and there are there are ways that characters can act as dam uh, as tanks or supports or focus on damage, but it's all more hybrid, I would say. like in my big theoretical model that all of the characters can be more

towards the middle of the giant triangular graph or can temporarily and at their choosing move towards one of the points if some yeah they can spike for a little while, right? um if they need to, right? Which is and these are fascinating um excellent examples of how um even if we can see the trinity in the game, it doesn't have to bind the game to the trinity, right?
Oh, hold on. Jeff, you have you have gone. You have become Oh no. Jeff's become a robot. Chat, clap. Clap if you believe in Jeff. Clap. Clap if you believe in Jeff. Oh no. Oh god. Hold on. I'm so bummed. We're having such a good conversation. And by the way, chat, while I try and get Jeff back, thank you all for being so uh active in all of

this. I um I know uh you all have been uh chiming off in chat and I've seen a lot of really good points um and we just don't have time for me to pull all of them up. Uh or um
no try one more time.
Hold on. I got a I got a message. Uh
yes, test test.
Now I can hear you. No,
now I can't hear a little better. Now I can send a key frame to viewer.
Okay, so I can see you, but your audio and video are desync. So let me try one more thing.
Okay.
Okay, Jeff, could you count for me?
Testing. One, two, three, four, five.
That's unfortunate.

I doubt I
You want me to drop and join?
Uh, yes, please.
Okay.
Yes, it is impressive. S Claus. Um, yeah, the robot revolution did take its first uh victim. Um, so I I think that there are a lot of like other viewpoints on this, right? Like the bulls, the tinies and tank killer DPS. Those are roles that accomplish the goals of mitigation, resources, and damage. I agree that that's another way that we could view it. Although I do think that we need to if we were going to have this in a way that we could get to that. I would need to do a lot more prep to deal with us being in a space that's much more theoretical. Right? Because I agree that one of the places where Jeff and I disagree and I think a lot of you are coming at this from a very experiential point of view and I agree that from that point of view everything you are saying makes sense is that I'm trying to get outside of experience on this and trying to talk about what the thing could be,

right? Like I'm trying to talk about like this philosophically uh interesting concept behind all of that. And I don't know that I'm equipped to do that without like I'm not kidding. 30 minutes of preamble, right? Like
1 2 3 4 5.
Now you're back. All right, cool. Anyway,
what happened? We don't know.
Robots. I'm going to blame robots. I'm going to blame another AWS outage. I'm going to blame I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah. Will. Yeah, that's correct. I'm trying to get at a kind of um uh I think this is Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, that Yeah, that's Yes. 100%. I think there are people who subscribe heavily to the Trinity. I think there are people who think the Trinity is bunk. And I think there's me who thinks that I I am actually further away from this than I think a lot of people think based on my line of argumentation. I think where I end up is I think that the trinity

exists as a way to mathematically talk about one perspective on a game design on on games and on the way
of combat,
right? or the and I will again stress that I believe I could accomplish this had we more time that it it abstracts beyond combat to merely working towards a goal with oppositional forces involved right that that that is a way that I could do this but that's a very long conversation where we have to talk about like what we mean by goal and I don't want to do that so but yes for combat for certain right but I will also say that it's very important to acknowledge that the difference in what makes a successful game from one that gets stuck in the mire is how you move away from the pure thing, right? So like
and [clears throat] maybe this is an interesting point to bring up fellowship

here where they designed a game
around three different archetypes of classes. And I might want to sprint through what we mean by something in a second, but somewhere along the line, something that they did for one of their classes, the tank class, and I haven't played the game, so I don't know what it is, was not as interesting or did not sell the fantasy as well as DPS and healer, resulting in
yes,
there being an imbalance in the game right now. And I will tell you what that thing is, Jeff, as someone who tried to get into tanking and is having a tough time with it.
Okay.
One of the tanks jobs in Fellowship specifically is routing.
It is to
What do you mean by routing?
That's a great question, Jeff. In order to complete a dungeon in Fellowship, you must kill a number of mobs equal to a kill score and then defeat the boss. That is how you That is how you measure accomplish it. You can't just run through the dungeon and just defeat the boss. You can't just kill mobs and not defeat the boss. You must do both. So

the So the most efficient way to do this is to
That's interesting. They basically remove sneaky or stealth from the option by saying must kill X. Okay.
Yes. So one of your jobs is to figure out how to get as close to 100% as efficiently as possible.
Mhm.
And take the party through that route, killing all of the mobs and ending up naturally at the boss. so that you can do this in the smallest amount of time possible because one of the criteria for successfully completing higher level dungeons is to do it under a time limit. You're under a time limit.
Why is it the tank's job?
Because they are the one doing the pulling.
Okay. Oh, okay. So, it is a pulling based.
Yes,
Jeff. Based on what I have just told you, the lack of which common uh MMO UYUX element would make that job incredibly difficult for first- timers.
Oh, I could think of a whole bunch.

Ability to gauge strength of mob. Some sort of like radar or mapping system so you can actually see what you're doing. Did I hit it?
There is no mini map. There is only a full screen map which completely obscures your view. And there is fall to your death planes. So you cannot have the map open while you are moving and you cannot see the information you need to make that decision unless you have that map open.
I'm guessing they also didn't give them stealth.
No, because there's no fog of war. So you know which mobs are going to be where. You don't need to go scouting. Stealth would also mean, for example, you could sneak up and get yourself in prime position for like back in my old day, one of the reasons that we actually had a rogue or sneaky style set of classes was they could go sneak up, scout around, find the thing, evaluate, and even without a mini map, actually do polls because they were able to fulfill the I can scout part of [laughter] it.

Sure. And I think that there was a world where that could be done by the community to compensate for this weakness.
Right. Um
but that also then played into the fantasy of scouty roy kind of thing.
Yes.
I sneak around, I do the thing. Correct.
And it's one of the reasons actually monks in EverQuest one were great because they had an ability called fain death.
Which they'd fall over like, "Oh, you're dead. Okay, what's the next thing to attack?" And you removed yourself from the aggro list.
Yeah. Um
so you could pull things in and if you got an excess, you could be like, "Ah, I'm dead."
Right. One of the really weird things is that it's possible that there that extra pulling might become the healer's job because at least one of the two healers has an aggro drop button where she goes like stealth and it's not like a real stealth but like she drops aggro. Um it's Sylvie. So yeah, but like to your point right
this is a nonintuitive thing where a non-damagebased non-mitigationbased missing element in my opinion

is one of the things that's causing there to be problems with people adopting a play style, right? Is that the archetype is not being supported because that's not that wasn't a priority. To be very clear, I think Fellowship is a very interesting game. It's still in early access. I think they have time to add a mini map. They're
techn Yeah. Right. To be clear, this is not like Fellowship is bad cuz they forgot mini map. It's no game survives first contact with its player base, right? Like every game when it gets into early access, especially a live access um a uh a live service game is going to need patches because people will break things because people are gremlins,
right? One of the other things for scouting, there are a number of games where the map may stay the same, but monsters may move around, different monsters may spawn in different places and things like that, which also is one of the things like if you're actually

this is part of game design. If you're like, hey, one of the fundamental things for our game is we want scouting to be interesting because we think that's a fun part of gameplay. You then build things into your design to make the scouting fantasy actually fulfillable.
And so like if you have a game where mobs are static and maps are static, you're not building a game where scouting is interesting.
Yeah.
And that's and again
and this is part of what you're building for what your players, you know, what you're building for your players to go play.
Yeah. I also want to just bring up one thing that um as as we as we move towards our wrap-up that I I have been noticing because a lot of people have brought it up.
Let's talk very briefly about the problems of using City of Heroes as an example.
So, Superheroes,
right? City of Heroes is a great fanun MMO. If you're not familiar with it at all,
was a great MMO and is now a great fan

MMO.
Correct. It shut down in 2012 and got revived by a bunch of fans and is in my opinion a shining example of a company going, you know what, sure. When the fans are like, we want to run it ourselves and the company was like, you know what, we don't care. More power to you. Right? One of the problems with using it as an example is that it is of a different age, right? many of the MMOs that we're talking about that are um super relevant in 2015 or in 2025, excuse me, um started after City of Heroes shutdown, right? So, it's not that it's not true, it's just that it belongs to a different era, right? And it becomes difficult because we could talk about like we could focus on like EverQuest and Runescape and City of Heroes and we could focus on like Ultima,
Warhammer Online, right? and the dark age of Camelot [clears throat] and like yeah it's been true. I think one of the things that that also makes this conversation difficult for Jeff and me is Jeff when was the last time you

played a tabtargeted MMO? Seriously?
Not for a while,
right? And I played one uh Tuesday and I'll be playing again. Actually, I played one this morning while I was eating breakfast and I'll be playing again tonight. Right. So, we're talking about different
But I have played a whole bunch of MOBAs and RPGs with character parties.
Right. Yeah. So, no, and that's not to say that we're um that you and I are not drawing from equally valid groups of games when we talk about this. We're just also talking about like
different eras in all of the things that we're talking about, right? Cuz I didn't like Balders's Gate 3 and I don't play League. I played Dota in ye olden days, right? Like so that is one of the difficulties in this conversation is we don't have a lot of
other one though that you're bringing up which is interesting is holy trinity is also in some cases a genre um
conceive
constraint the wrong word uh vision
superheroes for example when you went

and watched the Avengers
you know you go see Guardians of the Galaxies or the Avengers there isn't a healer I mean there are a couple characters that might be able to do pinch healing that there isn't a character there going, "Okay, Iron Man, heal, heal, heal." I in the in the fictional case of how you see the comic books or movies executed and in the same thing like Hulk might be called a tank, but he's also
you could easily
extremely destructive.
Yeah. DPS. I mean, so superhero genre doesn't play into the same as the fantasy genre on how classes are built or characters are molded around.
Yeah.
And so because of that, City of Heroes is also coming in with a non-standard a non-fantasybased assignment of the fantasies they want to fulfill when you pick a class.
Yeah. the the it also does bring up and I think that this is probably one of the

things that we might have done differently if we had to do this conversation again is talking about the difference between healing and support because many games now adopt tank DPS support what does support mean that's like a whole can of worms right healer isn't
that was my other thing about the archetype is like when you say tank if tank means four different things in four different games how much is can it like the archetype is squiggly at that point.
Well, or that the archetype is the nugget at the middle of all those things that's the same,
right? Just like healing is a kind of support, but not all support is healing. All ARB, not all B R A,
right?
Right.
So, yeah. Anyway,
you mentioned, by the way, earliest trinity and like I know it wasn't D and D because D and D didn't start off with a trinity. D and D started out with a quad.
Yeah, it's
and even then it was a really loose quad,
right? Um, I don't I don't know that there's

I think
I think it wasn't at least till 2010s.
Like I don't think
you would say it's probably earlier than that, but
maybe
Well, wow.
You're right. It probably is earlier, but like I think it really picked up as a broader
So, actually, you know what I would say? It's a shortorthhand.
It is. It's a great shortand
and it's a great contrivance for making parties that can do content and fill things. I would say it might be woow genuine
simply because
one of the funny things too is tank didn't used to mean crowd control. Chank meant ability to absorb damage
and only later had crowd control added to it.
And now I would say that um one of the uh the it's not even necessarily the ability to absorb damage in many games. It's the ability to control the fight that it's a subsp specialcialization of controller, right? Which is like a whole other conversation that we could have about what it means to control a fight and control the pacing. Um,
which is one of the reasons why

Fellowship includes routing in the tank set of responsibilities because that's a way that they control the dungeon.
It all gets really complicated. So, we are unfortunately out of time here, but I want to thank I want to thank all of you for joining us for this ridiculous episode. But thank you all so very much for uh giving me this present for my birthday. I've enjoyed it immensely. Um again,
well, by the way, Will, happy birthday.
Thanks, Jeff. Please, if you're watching this and you're like, "Wow, I want to see more of Will being ridiculous." Have I got the event for you this Saturday, October the 25th, from noon Eastern to midnight Eastern, we will be doing some crowd control Deep Rock Galactic Rock and Stone for charity. I will be playing uh with Matt, with the mods, with some guests throughout the day. Please join us for that. You'll be able to give to our charity of choice, direct relief, and in exchange for those generous donations, you'll be able to do things like summon bugs or get us get our characters drunk on stream. You'll be working towards a variety of interesting charity incentives. So, please look

forward to all of that uh this weekend. Um,
so really quickly since I think we just had somebody hop in who hasn't seen us live streaming before.
Connor, welcome. Yeah.
Then streaming on Twitch as well as doing extra credits for more than way more than a decade.
Yeah. Oh, well, we've been streaming here since two I've been here since 2018.
Yep. And Extra Credits has been streaming even before, but Will has been our main streamer. And half a year ago
is we realized that YouTube had finally made
streaming work.
Yeah. Streaming work. So we stream two shows a week.
Yep.
Design club every Thursday at 11 Pacific 2 Eastern where we talk for an hour or two about game design live or look at games. And every Monday morning we do X or excuse me games for breakfast where we talk about the week's gaming news plus.
Yeah.
In more of a rowdy shock jockey kind of way.
Yeah. with Will and Matt. Matt is our voice narrator and who if you ever see

somebody live in an extra credits or extra history video, it's Matt.
That's Matt. So, uh, but thank you all for joining us. Uh, I think that's it for us. So, all that remains, uh, is, you know, the usual sign off here, which is goodbye to the people, Jeff.
Goodbye to the people, Jeff. Thanks, everybody. [music]
[music]