D&D General What Should Today's Archetypes Be

[doctorbadwolf]

Captain - Fantasy is full of Captain America types. The Fearless Leader. The Commanding Charismatic Hero.

Expert - Scholarly or knowledgeable hero with specialties and probably decent at some of what the alchemist and sorcerer can do but mostly about knowledge, etc

Assassin - The shadowy lethal hero. Yes, hero. Based more on the romantic view of The Assassins, as fearless champions of thier people against more powerful forces. Contains a lot of the Ranger’s focus and targeted strikes and the rogues stealth and find and exploiting advantage. Can skirmish, but excels when moving in and out of shadow.

Jack - the trickster. Can be magic or not, often blurs the line between skill and the supernatural, has luck mechanics and the most general skills.

Knight or Champion - The big stalwart. Can be the immovable object or unstoppable force as a build choice or maybe a stance type thing, whatever, can make attacks to defend allies or stagger enemies, etc. not distinct moves, just some form of “when you attack you can impose one of these effects” type feature.

Sorcerer - This is the magic focused class. Imagine a warlock with a spellbook, more than a wizard.

Alchemist - Fully a hermetic mystic alchemist. Not the potion and bomb maker of D&D and pathfinder and such, no, this is the class that embraces science and magic as one thing. Can evoke and invoke power into things, craft items of power, dabble in what other magic users do, understands magic as part of [science].

Priest - Wards and barriers, dispelling and banishing, blessings and banes, at high level can call angels by name and gain thier aid, type stuff. Not themselves a direct combatant, normally.

Duelist - The swordmaster, kensei, etc. can move and attack too fast to track visually, has secret techniques that are mystical but not spell-like at all, not similar to the magic classes.

Also, I don’t think they’d be as generic as D&D classes were to start with. Like, the lore would come baked in, and the idea of separating one from the other would come later.

Also also, if we did see a Bard, it would not be the scoundrel face guy, it would be perhaps the heaviest magic user other than priest, but with completely different magic. Well, bane and blessing would be kinda in common, but otherwise the Bard would be about deep lore knowledge, aura buffs and debuffs and other effects (basically any creature that can hear you), knowing true names and other secrets and mysteries (in the classical sense), or might choose between a deeply scholarly storyteller role and a warrior-poet role. Gains perfect memory and a mechanic to drudge up a bit of story or song that answers a question posed to the PCs every so often. Can affect others’ luck.

If Druid appeared at all, it would be the Sage or the Priest, have secret coded language few others know, interact somehow with places of power in a unique way,


But!

I think that a lot of the concepts that are D&D classes, like the two above, Paladin or whatever it’d be called, even Wizard, and some subclass concepts like Kensei/Sword Saint, Cavalier/Chevalier/Knight (assuming the stalwart guy gets called Champion rather than knight), others I’m blanking on, would be post-chargen upgrades. I don’t think the D&D class system would exist, with its “here is X levels of progression for each class” dynamic, so it wouldn’t do that thing PrCs did where they stopped you leveling up as a rogue or whatever, but would just be “at this tier/level/whatever, you can gain a Mastery Archetype, which provides specific benefits and suggests particular goals and obligations.”

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It is not impossible to say, you just don’t have much, if any, certainty in what you say. But speculation and be fun and interesting.

One reason I haven’t answered the OP’s call is I am still wrapping my head around the premise and what would actually result from it.

It seems to me that that is essentially equivalent to saying, "What archetypes would you personally fill D&D with, if you had free rein?" It is, as you say, more interesting when there is some room for speculation--but when there is too much room for it, every flight of fancy is equally fitting, no matter how outlandish.

Anything could result from it, because we're talking about changing at least the last 25 years of fiction in subtle to profound ways. Hell, for all we know, without D&D, the LotR films never even get made!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It seems to me that that is essentially equivalent to saying, "What archetypes would you personally fill D&D with, if you had free rein?" It is, as you say, more interesting when there is some room for speculation--but when there is too much room for it, every flight of fancy is equally fitting, no matter how outlandish.

Anything could result from it, because we're talking about changing at least the last 25 years of fiction in subtle to profound ways. Hell, for all we know, without D&D, the LotR films never even get made!

I don't think that's really a reasonable position - I think it's kind of sort of "honest bad faith" one if that makes any sense. I get that you believe it, but it's also a sort of butterfly effect claim that means, by the same logic, we could never ask any question about anything speculative, because of the butterfly effect. In which case why be involved in the discussion?

As I illustrated you can dig through things and look at influences. Not everything is instantly influenced by D&D. D&D isn't that big a deal for quite a while, and without D&D, other, similar sources might well have been chosen.

I mean, we can imagine another fantasy RPG replacing a non-existent D&D - probably a little later in history - so with different influences itself. D&D derived heavily from fantasy novels of the era and it's quite likely another RPG would. By even the early 1980s, or with different people, it'd be a different bunch. Some things would be very likely - that there would both "fighting men" and "wizards" in the game, that some sort of lightly magical or non-magical bard/rogue/swashbuckler-type role would exist, because these people exist in the books of the era.

We can say other things would be astonishingly unlikely - as I've explained repeatedly, Clerics are an absolute freak of nature. The circumstances that combined to create them are basically impossible to repeat. There's no way at all anything much like that would have emerged independently of D&D specifically. Monks could only really appear in the 1970s, with a bunch of people obsessed with specifically 1970s martial arts movies. Vancian Wizards are also incredibly unlikely and bizarre, to the point where no-one not directly copying D&D, even when heavily inspired by D&D, has ever copied them! 2E's Bard, from which all current Bards spring, also seems pretty unlikely.

(The closest thing I could see us getting to a Cleric would be a sort of Van Helsing/Exorcist class at some point, but they'd a class dedicated to destroying evil supernatural beings, and might well not even be a spellcaster in a games-rules sense.)

So we can identify some stuff which would definitely be out, for sure.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's not like no one else would hit on 'adultify playing pretend' eventually, especially in the 70's and the free flow of just the right type of... enhancement to inspire fantasy works.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Forgot to add: I don’t think we’d actually see that much armor if D&D were being created today.

i think we might see significantly less of the classical leathers and metal armours but i feel like there'd be a significant increase in alternative armours and armours that do weird unique stuff, black ops stealth suits, supernatural mage robes, light durable kevlar, armours with elemental resistances or effects, a gliding wingsuit.

 

[deganawida]

i think we might see significantly less of the classical leathers and metal armours but i feel like there'd be a significant increase in alternative armours and armours that do weird unique stuff, black ops stealth suits, supernatural mage robes, light durable kevlar, armours with elemental resistances or effects, a gliding wingsuit.

Oh, definitely, as things which are swapped out as needed. Kinda like how some action figure lines release new, specialized costumes for their main toy, so you would have Fire Fighting Sorcerer, Arctic Blast Sorcerer, Shark-Repellent Sorcerer

 

[Ruin Explorer]

i think we might see significantly less of the classical leathers and metal armours but i feel like there'd be a significant increase in alternative armours and armours that do weird unique stuff, black ops stealth suits, supernatural mage robes, light durable kevlar, armours with elemental resistances or effects, a gliding wingsuit.

Yes. Even with actual RPGs we've seen a little of this - for example Earthdawn had the amazingly cool implanted magic bead armour as just a thing you could have.

 

[deganawida]

Yes. Even with actual RPGs we've seen a little of this - for example Earthdawn had the amazingly cool implanted magic bead armour as just a thing you could have.

Upvote for Earthdawn reference. Such an underrated system.

 

[billd91]

Monks are pure 1970s. Absolute pure 1970s. There is no other decade in the 20th or 21st centuries where that class could have been developed. Not one. Even if we just shifted to the 1980s, Monks would be out, and the "martial arts" class would be Ninjas.

The ninja influence would be significant, but that wouldn't necessarily keep out the monk archetype. Late night kung fu action was still HUGE throughout the 1980s with Shaw Brothers movies, huge enough to spark Big Trouble in Little China in 1986. The 1990s brought a lot of wire-fu as well as Jet Li films.
Honestly, there's no reason for a Shaolin temple archetype or monk to not make it into D&D.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Honestly, there's no reason for a Shaolin temple archetype or monk to not make it into D&D.

You're being extremely silly. There's no chance it would make it AS A CLASS into D&D after the 1970s.

As an subclass or something? Quite possibly.

Notable that Big Trouble in Little China doesn't feature any Monk archetype martial-artists. And HK movies in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly featured martial artists who weren't monks, quickly reaching the point were none were.

Re: 1980s late night TV - let's be clear - all it takes is a significant proportion of martial artists to NOT be Monks to mean Monk is out. Ninjas, karatekas and so on would mean no Monk class as we know it would be made. A martial artist class, one of the options of which allowed you to have a Shaolin-esque character? Sure. But what Monk is right now, in 2023, is a purely 1970s-originated archetype, preserved like a living fossil.