We play a role playing game. Surprise right? One aspect of that is that we are role playing, taking on some character, and portraying them through our actions and words.
On an individual level, this might mean that you play a character; that has individualized and personality traits. For example: You’re a pirate. And you say “Y’arr I’m a pirate.” Great right? That’s not what this article is focusing on.
Rather, I’d like to talk about our roles within the community, in regards to each other. You might be familiar with the concept if you play tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, or if you play MMO’s. Some such roles might be “tank” or “DPS” ( damage per second), or healer. Each of those has roles within a scenario, the tank draws damage from the enemy to protect its allies, the DPS deals damage to put the enemies down, and the healer keeps them going when they’re not doing their jobs well enough.
It works. It keeps them interacting with the game, and with each other.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t care what your role is. I just am advocating that you think about what it might be while you’re designing your character.
The first step might be identifying realistic roles within our game. An obvious one is fighter, but fighter sort of takes on a lot of the combat roles we see from other games, a fighter can fill both the Tank and DPS roles, a lot of the times. You might make an argument for Lightning Bolt casters, or Assassins as being the DPS, because they have armor piercing blows, however, both of those spells would have a challenging time making it through multiple enemies in quick succession, where as a fighter might be able too. Depending on the circumstance and skill level, of course.
If direct combat isn’t your thing, what other roles might you design for, or play to? There is support casting, of course, which would essentially fill the above listed healer role, a lot of the time, but what else?
Informant. Our game specifically has the role of information gathering, it’s largely built into what was the Seer path, however, anyone who takes spells and abilities specifically for the sake of being in the know is essentially an informant. This is an important role to play towards, because if you’ve ever been on a quest, you know there are people that simply have no idea what’s going on, and they just sort of are riding the wave of the quest wherever it takes them.
Now you can build towards a role from alternate avenues, for example, while you might not think of yourself as a support caster when you have a necromancy build, it’s pretty easy to build a support caster from that build. At the same time, there are some really combat effective spellcaster builds, like a 1 path, with resist magic, 1 point of armor, and aura of protection, and enchant armor. They might be a little more situationally specific, but that’s not a bad thing so long as you’re aware of where you fit in.
So what happens to person who plays against their role? In my humble experience, if you play against the role you’ve built your character to be, you’re going to have less fun. For example, if as a fighter, I try to play an informant role, I will probably find I have a harder time at it than say a Seer type build. That isn’t to say I can’t be in the know, by asking the people around me, but it will be inherently more challenging for me. Likewise, if a 3 path with no combat spells tries to go toe to toe with a big bad monster, they might get frustrated with the challenge that comes from it.
I might be stating the obvious in that, and you might think I’m an asshole telling you how to play the game you love. But the heart of this piece comes from a piece of advice that I often give to newbies; when you’re starting out don’t play an assassin. Weird advice right? Why do I tell people that? This game is community based. We are here to play together. I don’t care how shy or introverted you are, you come to the game to play with other people. So build a character that encourages you to interact with other people. Assassins, classically, tend to be the hide in the shadows killing folks kind of characters. And while we have them in our game, they don’t tend to be as self sufficient as they seem like they should be. They aren’t always as combat effective as you think they might be, and they certainly don’t encourage you to play well with others.
If you want to build yourself in the community, play a role that makes you interact with people. Support casting is probably number one for this. But there are certainly other roles that do the same thing. Ultimately at the end of the day, play what makes you happy, but I hope this article has put some thoughts into you as to what that might be.
See you on the field
Keith “Saegan” Cronyn
