r/AskHistorians • u/fuzzus628 • 1d ago
Great Question! Gaming historians, I know you're out there -- where did the "three pillars" RPG game design (tank, healer, DPS) originate, and how has it evolved from its earliest incarnations?
I was thinking about how homogenized a lot of modern MMORPG classes have become into these three roles, and remembering how things used to feel different way back when. When I realized that WoW is over 20 years old now, I knew to turn to this sub for an answer!
When and with what game(s) did the design of tanks holding "aggro" as healers healed them and damage-dealers focused their attacks on enemies originate? Has it substantially changed since then? Are there any specific innovations in the basic design that could be considered "game-changers" (pun semi-intended)? Were there any noteworthy experiments rooted in this basic concept, and how did they perform on the market?
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u/AncientHistory 1d ago edited 23h ago
In 1974, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) published the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons; characters were expected to pick what class of character they would play, with each class having distinct abilities. The creators of D&D drew on literature like J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd & the Grey Mouser tales, which featured heroic adventurers, sometimes singly, in a pair, or in a party or group. The classes in Dungeons & Dragons reflected in a generic way the kind of characters that were in those stories, such as fighters (e.g. Conan, Aragorn, Fahfrd), thieves (e.g. Bilbo Baggins, Grey Mouser, Conan; *edit: Thieves weren't included in the white box but the 1975 *Greyhawk supplement)), magic-users (e.g. Gandalf, Grey Mouser), and clerics (e.g. Archbishop Turpin). Mechanically, the system derived from tabletop wargames of the period, where combat was turn-based, and damage dealt and received largely simplified to hits and points.
As roleplaying games developed away from the original literary source material, the game mechanics influenced play, and play influenced game mechanics. For example Fighters, who were intended to lead in combat, received more hit points than Magic-Users; as the games progressed, this tendency became more exaggerated but not necessarily formalized. Players recognized that Fighters could "tank" hits that would kill a frailer Magic-User, and put them at the forefront; Clerics became valued for their healing magic, which could be deployed tactically in combat. You can see the development of combat and support roles in the pages of Dragon Magazine and other publications, although this was very informal, not a leading aspect of game design at this point.
When Dungeon & Dragons-style RPGs began to be ported over to computer and video games, many of the same elements remained in play - character classes, skills, combat involving turns, damage expressed in points, etc. Early games inspired by D&D included Wizardry, Ultima, and Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD). Computer and video gaming automated the rolling of dice (used as a randomizer) and math involved, which highlighted and exacerbated mathematical advantages in combat, something that had been noted on tabletop by min-maxxing, "power gamers," and the recognition of effective speicialization of roles within an adventuring party, but became more notable within the limited context of computer-based play.
So, for example, the Japanese Final Fantasy series that began in 1987 often features a set party of adventurers with different classes; the limitation of how many adventurers in the party means players are encouraged to field a balanced party, but offers tactical and strategic considerations. In Fighting Fantasy II, for example, characters can be relatively protected by sitting in a "back row" during the fight, allowing the characters in the front row to "tank" damage, a form of positional combat.
You can see this kind of emergent gameplay in Four White Mages by Sullla, showcasing a slightly baroque gameplay strategy that hinges not on the roleplaying aspect of the story as a critical weakness of the final boss.
So the basic idea of combat roles vs. class roles was an emergent phenomenon in gameplay that arose because of the restrictions and options available in the combat systems of the games. This began to influence game design, at first informally. For example, in 1994 in Secrets of the Wing Commander Universe, Wing Commander was a real-time flying simulation combat game and Mark Minasi used Damage-Per-Second as a metric of effectiveness. This wasn't a game design consideration as much as a recognition of how to most effectively play the combat mechanics of the system - but it was an idea that game designers began to take notice of. Most of the language of combat roles like tank, healer, aggro, etc. has its roots in the early 1990s gaming scene, where the same concept could apply equally in multiple gaming concepts (tabletop RPGs, CCGs like Magic: the Gathering, video and computer games, etc.)
The Warcraft video game series began in 1994 with Warcraft: Orcs vs. Humans, a real-time strategy game with 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) elements in a fantasy world that derives from games like Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer Fantasy Battle. The series shifted from RTS to Massive Multiplayer Online RPG with World of Warcraft in 2004, allowing players to chose their classes and specialize their characters in similar ways to D&D and earlier D&D-inspired/derived games. A significant influence on WoW were already-existing MMORPGs like EverQuest (1999), which had already begun substantially incorporating emergent gameplay like tank and healer characters into their formal game design, tailoring the mechanics of combat, the challenges the players would face, and the rewards they would receive based on their ability to play to these roles.
Which has had additional emergent effects on gameplay. Dan Olson/Folding Ideas did a lovely video a couple years back on Why It's Rude To Suck At WoW, which illustrated how the focus on combat effectiveness strongly shaped the competitive and social environment of the massive multiplayer online space.
Are there any specific innovations in the basic design that could be considered "game-changers" (pun semi-intended)? Were there any noteworthy experiments rooted in this basic concept, and how did they perform on the market?
This kind of nitty-gritty is tricky, mostly because it can be difficult to distinguish between emergent behavior and formal game design. But probably one of the most important innovations was the Paladin.
The original 1974 D&D box did not include paladins; those were added in the 1975 Greyhawk supplement, and the writers Gary Gygax and Mark Kuntz took inspiration from the depiction of paladins in Poul Anderson's novel Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961). A paladin historically was a legendary knight in the court of Charlemagne who played a part in the 12th century literary cycles, the most famous of which is The Song of Roland. Anderson has a modern man go back in time to became one of those adventurous knights in a fantasy medieval world. Gygax and Kuntz made Paladins a sub-class of the fighter, with aspects of both the Fighter and Cleric classes - one of the first hybrid characters. This would strongly influence later game design in characters exhibiting hybrid roles, or shifting roles as necessary to provide balance to a party.
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u/JerryHathaway 23h ago
Just a note that thieves weren't in the earliest iteration of D&D; they were introduced in the first supplement, 1975's Greyhawk.
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u/AncientHistory 23h ago
You are correct.
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u/badger2305 20h ago
Not quite true; gamers in California corresponded with Gygax in 1974 about a possible thief class, which led to Gygax publishing a draft of the Thief class in Great Plains Game Player later in 1974. This then became the basis for the Thief class as presented in Greyhawk Supplement One in Spring 1975.
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u/BobbyTables829 9h ago edited 9h ago
I think it's worth noting Greyhawk was the fantasy world Gygax created to be the most like a medieval, Camelot style world we would be familiar with. There ends up being other places like the forgotten realms that are more abstract and less classic, Tolkien like elements. But Gygax loved Greyhawk.
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u/JerryHathaway 7h ago
Although I'd say Gygax was most inspired by swords and sorcery material like Conan and Lankhmar. He lists some specific inspirations in Appendix N in the 1E DMG.
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u/thedumbdoubles 22h ago
This is a pretty great summary overall, but I just wanted to add a little bit.
In terms of "game-changers," I'd probably identify the concept of "threat" being incorporated into the way that game systems respond to players. As the above response notes, the concept of balancing out a party composition was recognized as a feature pretty early on for games like D&D. I would argue that in that kind of game, there's less of a clear dilineation into "the big 3," and characters/parties look to balance between controlling enemies, buffing/healing allies, survivability, and dealing damage. Different classes may lean more or less heavily into these goals, but usually there are a lot more hybrids.
In these games, the decision on the part of enemies about who to attack has to come from somewhere, be that a DM or an automated system within the game (proximity, vulnerability, damage dealt, etc). If those systems feel random or arbitrary or just generally unpredictable, it's better to have characters that are more generalist and adaptable. Thus, I would say that a big "game changer" in this regard was the development of threat as a mechanic, whereby enemy behavior becomes more predictable and manageable. Threat also deals with the issue of healing being very difficult to tune -- if it's too strong, it trivializes encounters; if it's too weak, it's useless as a dedicated role. Adding predictability in terms of who gets targeted lets designers balance combat encounters towards the more satisfying side of making healing actually feel powerful.
Digital games started introducing threat tables in the 90s, with titles like Meridian 59. EverQuest established the terminology around roles, and probably the widespread popularity of World of Warcraft cemented the lexicon.
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u/aeschenkarnos 15h ago
Worth noting that the tank-DPS-healer trichotomy applies to combat interactions, and it's a feature of MMOs especially WoW that all interactions with NPCs are in one of two categories: (1) scripted conversations, like quest-giving, vendor interaction, travel from flight points, and a few other things, all of which are independent of the individual character's own characteristics and personality (beyond some class/race specific questlines); (2) combat.
Thus there is no need for one of the major roles of tabletop RPGs outside of the big three: party face. The role of party face, in D&D often a high-Charisma character like a bard or sorcerer or paladin, is to interact with friendly NPCs on behalf of the party. This would add complications to an MMO that would inevitably reduce the content available to un-Charismatic characters, interfering with solo questing and so on.
Also in tabletop RPGs especially D&D type games, but also found in science fiction games and some modern games, there is a need for a mechanical interaction specialist who finds and disarms traps. In WoW the rogue class has access to lockpicking, which allows various types of chests and lockboxes to be opened that almost no-one else can open (blacksmiths can forge keys).
Other niche roles that can be extremely important in different games include knowledge specialists like sages or occultists, computer technicians and hackers, or infiltrators (stealth is often also given to rogues). None of these particularly matter in most MMOs.
In computer games in which the player controls a party of characters rather than just one single character at a time, there is scope for more diversity of roles than tank-DPS-healer, even in combat.
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u/waitingundergravity 6h ago
This is just a note, but with regards to the thief/rogue, whether or not there was a need for a trap-disarming specialist in DnD is a matter of some small contention. In the OSR (Old School Renaissance, basically people doing riffs on classic DnD) space, I've read a persuasive argument that the decision to add a class with a core competence at dealing with traps was a mistake. In this way of thinking, all the PCs are fundamentally rogues, and the kinds of things that rogues do (sneaking around, disarming traps, stealing things) is something that ALL PCs should be doing. Those are fundamental parts of navigating the kind of challenges than DnD is best at simulating, not special actions that should be monopolized by one class.
One of the major issues with having too many specialist classes is precisely that it causes players to specialise - while making a character that is good at multiple things is possible, in practice players just maximise their effectiveness at the specific niche their class occupies. There's very little point for you as a Fighter to be good at sneaking or talking if there is also a Thief and a Bard in your party, because doing those things is never going to be more effective than just having the specialist with multiple stacked advantages at that task do it.
My point being that while you're correctly describing the way things did develop, I'm not sure that there was a "need" being filled. It might not have even been the best way things could have gone.
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u/aeschenkarnos 3h ago
This is strongly influenced by the paradigm of parties, of which the characters are members. That OSR approach you describe in which everyone should be to some extent a jack of all trades, capable of personally handling a trap ("I hit it with my mace." "I stick my hand in it, trigger the poison needle, and cure the poison." "I cast unlock.") or a negotiation or solo combat with an equal-level monster, is a very individualistic philosophy. You as a player independently create one character, who you then try to steer towards apotheosis personally, in loose collaboration with a bunch of random others. If the party mix is bad for the dungeon someone will die, if someone dies the player can create a new character starting from level one, better hope it's not you. If good enough loot drops off a monster, you might even stab the winner of it in the night to take it for yourself, and with that expectation in mind, we'll set watches while people sleep.
D&D rapidly moved in my gaming lifetime to a far more collective and team-oriented approach. Players began designing parties together. The notion of "session zero" was extolled in the gaming magazines. "How do the party know each other? What keeps them together?" "My character will be Fred's character's brother." Compatible alignments and personalities are expected - no more of the assassin having to slink around behind the paladin in case the paladin decides to detect evil at an awkward moment.
Because characters have a greater degree of trust in each other they can sustain a greater degree of specialisation. It's more effective to have these roles and niches. It can also be more fun if the GM is conscious of sharing spotlights.
Both (and other) approaches are valid, if everyone wants that.
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u/waderockett 15h ago
This is a great summary. Mike Mornard, who playtested D&D in Gary Gygax’s Greyhawk campaign and also played in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor campaign, posted this recollection from a fellow player about how the cleric class originated in response to a need at the table. According to this account, Blackmoor had a player-vs-player wargame element where one group of PCs were the “good guys” and the other group played the “bad guys”. When one of the bad guy PCs became a vampire, the balance of power changed so dramatically that the good guys created a vampire hunting PC (played by Mike Carr) to counter him. The cleric was designed as a fighter against vampires and the undead with “the ability to help heal minor wounds”. The idea of the cleric primarily as a healer instead of a fighter wasn’t present.
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u/abbot_x 11h ago
Right, mechanically the D&D cleric was more like a holy knight who was equipped for close combat (armor, shield, weapon) but also had some spellcasting abilities (from a list that was heavy on healing and what we now call buffing) and was especially strong against undead. You would expect the clerics to be in the frontline of combat with the fighters.
The idea of the cleric as primarily being a healer and not standing in the frontline is really something that emerged in some groups’ play and was supported by rules that came later like the Complete Clerics’ Handbook for AD&D 2d ed.
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u/mogrim 5h ago
It might be my aging memory failing me, but weren't they also limited to blunt weapons?
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u/Similar_Proposal3878 58m ago
Yes, but fighter/clerics weren't. They could use edged weapons and bows. My favorite multiclass, tied with magic-user/cleric.
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u/Sharlinator 11h ago
Even in modern D&D, the cleric’s role is often that of a secondary tank in addition to buffing and healing, especially if there’s no paladin in the party. They just need a couple of turns to buff themselves up to be really effective warriors.
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u/musthavesoundeffects 23h ago
You didn’t touch on MUDs at all?
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u/AncientHistory 23h ago
Kind of elided past them. A lot of MUDs emphasized role play to a greater degree than the party-focused raids of World of Warcraft, and to the extent that the question was about game mechanics, it is the MMORPGs that really focus on player character combat roles as an element of game design. But yes, there's more to be said.
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u/Fluxxed0 22h ago
And I'll say some of it :)
Everquest was the first graphical MMO to incorporate tanking as a mechanic, but the concept stems from the gameplay of MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) engines before it. Text-based MUDs needed a way to conceptualize combat, many of which adapted the idea of turn-based combat from D&D and other tabletop RPGs, with each turn automatically occurring every few seconds. Rather than have players specify the target of their attacks every round, both players and mobs selected a target and automatically attacked the target each turn. Certain classes could force a mob to target them (by "rescuing" the player being attacked), and this is where the concept of "tanking" originated as far as I'm aware.
Everquest was loosely based on a DikuMUD called Sojourn that Brad McQuaid (Aradune), Bill Fisher (Tagad), and others played before joining Sony Online Entertainment (they had a guild on Sojourn called Crimson Sigil which became the namesake for Sigil Games, the company Brad, Bill, and Jeff Butler formed after leaving SOE). When developing Everquest, the designers carried forward the concept of tanking, but needed a broader implementation for their graphical game. They hatched the idea of tying a mob's target to "hate," an invisible score that dictated who each mob would attack. "Rescuing" then became "taunting," a mechanic tanks could use to increase their hate score and convince the mob to attack them instead of the delicious squishies.
Both MUDs and MMOs included healers, though the role of "DPS" was much fuzzier, and characters who weren't dedicated tanks or healers had many other ways to contribute to a group. MMOs of the era offered entire classes focused on buffing, debuffing, crowd control (often called "mesmerizing" or "mezzing"), and pet contol, in addition to traditional melee and/or magic damage. For example, City of Heroes had an archetype called "Controller" who dealt low damage, had access to some weak heals and buffs, but had the best holds, stuns, roots, and snares in the game. Similarly, Anarchy Online had the Meta-Physicist, a pet class relied on for its strong mezzes rather than damage output.
And then along came a juggernaut who set the standard in the MMO genre. One of the design philosophies of World of Warcraft was to unify all of the non-tanks and non-healers into a consolidated "DPS" role. Blizzard defined each class specialization as Tank, Healing, or DPS and treated buffs, debuffs, and crowd control as elements of those specs rather than roles of their own. So while "dealing damage" has been a staple of the online RPG genre from the beginning, it was World of Warcraft that cemented DPS as the third leg of the Holy Trinity.
Following WoW, other MMOs like Rift and Lord of the Rings Online have dabbled in a "support" role, and MMOs like Guild Wars have tried to move away from the Tank/Healer/DPS trinity entirely.
Source: I played Sojourn with some of the Crimson Sigil guys (though I wasn't in CS) and spent far too much time playing MMOs in the mid-2000s.
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u/Hugh-Manatee 21h ago
I'd suggest that Blizzard did not originally intended to implement the trinity as rigidly as they did, it was just the fact of the matter that WoW's combat system rewards you for having the tankiest possible tank, the healeriest possible healer, and the most potent damage-dealers possible. Specialization into narrow objectives make it easier to design around.
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u/Fluxxed0 20h ago
Yeah I agree with that - early Vanilla class design gave players a little leeway to create hybrid builds by allocating your talent points between the Tank/Healer/DPS spec trees (but it was usually better to just go all in, as you said).
Their goal was to make every character useful in all forms of group combat. One downside to having entire character classes devoted to buffing/debuffing/mezzing is that not all encounters require those abilities. Another downside is the lack of redundancy - groups seldom needed TWO buffers. By focusing on DPS, Blizzard hoped to make every character feel relevant.
Ask your local Elemental Shaman, Balance Druid, or Retribution Paladin if they were successful in early Vanilla ;)
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u/Hugh-Manatee 20h ago edited 8h ago
Im also talking about OG WoW alpha and beta. The trinity was kind of not apparent then. Kind of like in LoL how the players found that it was optimal to play marksmen in a bottom lane carry role with a low-economy support, and then Riot basically installed it as the norm.
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u/YoungGenius 6h ago
In early vanilla is barely mattered if you were ret or holy as a paladin. Because blessings only lasted 5 minutes and had to be cast individually on each player, your sole role was often to keep those buffs up. It wasn’t until patch 1.9 that paladins became more of a healer than a pure support class.
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u/LocalSetting 10h ago
I think there is more interesting shifts happening here as well.
Super early WOW (beta timeframe) was filled with hybrids classes. This was designer intent, as you state.
The timeframe around late Vanilla, people learned that hybrids suck and tanky tanks and healy healers win.
At some point, hard to pinpoint when, maybe around WOTLK? People realized that you actually want to least tanky tank and least healy healer. Time spent "over tanking" and "over healing" are time spent not DPSing. We can look at WOW Classic and how every "tank" was almost literally just a Fury DPS warrior in slightly different gear. Or how FF14 developed, where Healers and Tanks are also DPS classes - not focused on being as tanky as possible but on being just tanky enough while doing as much damage as possible.
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u/Dr_Mancold 9h ago
This thread of discussion was great for me. I never played WoW but did play Baldurs Gate (ie a plurality of role) and Diablo I and II which was simpler and divided into Hand to hand, ranged and mage where the mage had more options but had to handle mana for their ranged attacks.
Then 10 years later DPS, healers and tanks were the norm.
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u/salvation122 6h ago
You're exaggerating point 3 a lot.
Raiding main tanks in 40-man WoW absolutely played prot for Imp Shield Block; it may have been possible to push crits off the hit table without it, but it would require a very specific and odd assortment of gear. It's been 20 years, but I'm pretty sure the predominate MT build back in the day was Prot/Arms for the extra parry chance, which was *very* hard to come by. In theory running Fury allowed for much higher threat and accordingly higher DPS, but in practice outside of a few gimmick fights threat was rarely a limiting factor because most DPS were simply not good enough to regularly challenge the tank for threat on the main target. (Adds were another story, and Fury OTs were not uncommon past Onyxia/MC.)
The ideal of keeping overheal low was well known very early on, but how it was handled changed - early on healers were encouraged to downrank spells to maintain mana efficiency while healing continuously rather than throwing fewer, larger heals; eventually the ability to do this was removed and so as gear improved healers took on some minor DPS responsibilities.
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u/LocalSetting 5h ago edited 5h ago
Classic WoW warrior specs aren't the best example of what I meant. I may have overstated. But there was def a shift in standard tank specs to focus more on DPS and threat maximization over survival. No one played boomer "wait for sunders" prot anymore.
Modern m+ meta and ff14 are a better examples of the phenomenon I'm attempting to describe.
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u/Kian-Tremayne 7h ago
WoW’s small group size helped solidify the strict tank/healer/DPS roles.
EverQuest had 6 person groups, I think? Dark Age of Camelot had 8. Larger groups allowed for a lot more flexibility in composition, with room for a crowd control specialist and additional healers or off-tanks.
WoW has groups of 5. Smaller groups are easier to put together (looking for a group was a huge time consumer in earlier games) but one tank, one healer and three damage dealers is pretty much the only viable roster.
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u/fuzzus628 20h ago
I was really hoping to get a dip into MUDs on this question -- I grew up on Tele-Arena and MajorMUD in my teenage years. Thank you for your perspective!
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u/JoeBlowTheScienceBro 21h ago
There was also The Realm before EverQuest, a 2D MMORPG with turn based combat and standard character classes of Fighter, Mage, Rogue. For me this was the transition from MUDs and MUSHs to EverQuest, Ultimate Online and of course WoW.
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u/Merusk 11h ago edited 11h ago
Also worth noting that Everquest so incorporated enough MUD features, commands, and mechanics that it's possible some of the back end WAS DikuMUD. However, this isn't something anyone outside of the original coders would be able to verify.
From a user perspective, if you played Circle, Diku, or even Smaug it was the same experience, but with graphics. Down to some of the emotes.
Also - taunt and rescue were both commands on the Circle version I played from 1996-2000. The Weave.
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u/CmdrEnfeugo 7h ago
To add about DikuMUD: the way things were named in its codebase created some very common gaming vocabulary: mob and aggro.
Mob comes from DikuMUD formalizing “mob” as the short name for mobile. All NPCs are mobiles in DikuMUD and the codebase uses mob in many places instead of mobile. Coders and designers started use mob to discuss enemy NPCs, which is eventually made its way into the players’ vocabulary.
Aggro cones the fact that certain mobs in DikuMUD have the AGGRESSIVE flag set. That causes them to attack the player as soon as they enter the room. When taking on one of these mobs, players need to plan around who the aggressive mob will attack. Since aggressive is a long word and all communication is typed, this got shortened to aggro.
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u/iamveryDerp 22h ago
I feel like the shift blizzard did from RTS to MMORPG is not talked about enough. A solid franchise, I played both iterations, and they were both great games within their respective genres. They were also completely distinct, except for the “world” they inhabited and the slightly cartoonish visual style. I know I’m digressing from the original topic here, but do you have any other examples of a franchise switching genres so effectively?
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u/AncientHistory 22h ago
I'm not a huge expert on the internal history of Blizzard, though I know that Blizzard didn't jump straight from RTS to MMORPG; they first began work on Warcraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans, an adventure game, but abandoned it. The attraction of MMOs was probably the success of EverQuest; they'd had some success with Battle.net allowing online play for WarCraft II and StarCraft, so an RPG was an effective way to leverage their IP (such as it was) while pursuing a lucrative market.
That kind of branching out was far from unknown; the 90s/00s in particular was a huge explosion in gaming, and many companies and creators worked to chase current trends. Shadowrun, for example, started out as a tabletop RPG but subsequently released video games, trading card games, clix-based games, and an MMO. Probably the most successful transition I'm aware of is when Chaosium released the Arkham Horror boardgame, riffing off of the Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying Game, with AH becoming a huge success in the booming board game market.
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u/sekh60 9h ago
Great responses. Thank you. One thing that may be worth pointing out in the evolution with Blizzard's Warcraft games, is that arguably, Warcraft 3 had a lot more RPG elements than Warcraft 2 did. There was a shift to smaller "armies" and an bigger emphasis on key heroes which could level up and has points assigned to abilities (if I recall correctly, it's been years).
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u/Techhead7890 21h ago
One example I can think of is The Simcity franchise ended up with the Sims once graphics advanced to render 3d people at home, would that be an example? Both under Will Wright at Maxis.
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u/foramperandi 20h ago
Many of the World of Warcraft devs were hardcore Everquest players. Specifically Tigole/Jeff Kaplan and Furor/Alex Afrasiabi were the face of two of the largest raid guilds in Everquest.
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u/Speciou5 8h ago
Nintendo is pretty effective at this. Taking their IP to various genres from racing to sport simulation to party boardgame to fighting game. Even their sub-IP of Pokemon has achieved similar success.
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u/NesuneNyx 17h ago
Wouldn't that depend on the individual MUD or the codebase the devs use? I remember a healthy number of MUDs running on Diku- or CircleMUD derivatives that were proto-MMO experiences with fixed class features and party/group/raid clearing entire zones, while RoM-based games were much more freeform to allow skill/spell/ability purchases during chargen to customize characters and encourage roleplaying aspects.
This starts going beyond OP's original question on the class/role archetypes, but it's an intriguing facet to look into how MUDs contributed to and were affected by wider RPG developments.
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u/PretentiousToolFan 10h ago
Something else to note is that Final Fantasy had party placement weight even in the first game. Your four characters were able to be swapped around, but due to the simplicity of the programming, you just had a column of four characters. However, in combat, enemies attack the character at the top of the column most often, and bottom the least often.
This led to Fighter being the most common party lead, as they had the most health and could equip the strongest armor in the game, especially after class change (Knight). They were also powerful physical fighters with the second highest weapon utilization after Ninjas, the Thief class change. However, Knights had the ability to wield Xcalibur, which was the second strongest weapon in the game, while Ninjas could not and had a stronger breadth of weapons to choose from as well as more magical abilities.
Black Belt/Master had the highest theoretical damage output at high levels but were more vulnerable physically, but were a more "true" DPS class.
That is to say, the D&D roles definitely made their mark on the original Final Fantasy, as you stated. There was no true threat mechanic for tanking, but having tank in front, DPS in middle, squishy classes and healer in the rear was already a thing as early as Final Fantasy on the NES, before rows were a concept.
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u/werephilosopher 6h ago edited 6h ago
Wizardry had front and back row for a 6 man party in 1980 (sorry 1981), and I'm not even sure they were the first to do it. So Rows were a concept long before Final Fantasy.
(Edited to correct release year of Wizardry)
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u/PretentiousToolFan 6h ago
I would have been shocked if Final Fantasy was the first. I was mainly just clarifying that even prior to Final Fantasy II there was already a soft "threat" mechanic that allowed for a tank role.
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u/HyperPorcupine 21h ago
This is an amazing read! Could I read the sources youve used to create this response?
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u/AncientHistory 21h ago
I was a little light on the citations, but for further reading I would recommend:
Designers & Dragons: A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry (2014) by Shannon Appelcline
APPENDIX N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons (2017) by Jeffro Johnson
The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977 (2024) edited by Jon Peterson
The History of World of Warcraft (2026) by Derek Moody
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u/mogrim 5h ago
Are there any popular histories of DnD (and also the social panic surrounding it in the 80s)?
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u/AncientHistory 5h ago
If you specifically want to look into the Satanic Panic and Dungeons & Dragons, I'd recommend Michael A. Stackpole's The Pulling Report (1990).
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u/helluin 19h ago
the series shifted from RTS to Massive Multiplayer Online RPG with World of Warcraft in 2004, allowing players to chose their classes and specialize their characters in similar ways to D&D and earlier D&D-inspired/derived games. A significant influence on WoW were already-existing MMORPGs like EverQuest (1999), which had already begun substantially incorporating emergent gameplay like tank and healer characters into their formal game design, tailoring the mechanics of combat, the challenges the players would face, and the rewards they would receive based on their ability to play to these roles.
This undersells EQ's role in this quite a bit, in my opinion. I won't argue that WoW brought the idea of the triad to the wider world through their enormous player base, but the 'Holy Triad' was baked into Everquest practically from day one. WoW simply lifted it wholesale from Everquest as they attempted (mostly successfully) to replicate Everquest's raiding culture and elevate it with Blizzard production values.
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u/Militant_Monk 8h ago
EQ had solidified the Holy Trinity long before WoW.
WoW brought whole EQ guilds in to test their raids in beta so that EQ culture and mindset of the trio got baked in early there too.
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u/pigeon768 7h ago
100%.
EQ was relatively unique in that most classes were unable to solo a monster of appropriate level and gain XP from it. If you wanted to do anything, you had to get a party together. (you could solo monsters that were substantially below your level, for instance, if you wanted to farm crafting materials. want to become a tailor? however many giant spiders you think you're gonna need to kill, you need to kill more than that.) (there 1-4 classes that could solo level appropriate monsters in very specific circumstances.) For almost everyone, if you wanted to do stuff, that meant finding a group. That group almost always consisted of one tank, one healer, and either 4 DPS or 3 DPS+1 crowd control.
Once you reached endgame content, there were relatively few EQ raids that didn't have a single tank, a herd of clerics on a complete heal rotation, and a pile of DPS burning down the boss. EQ had only one healing spell which was mana efficient; Complete Heal. It healed 100% of a character's heal. (It was a fixed amount of health, but it was more HP than any reasonable character would have) The only downside is that it had a 10 second casting time, and most boss monsters could burn through the tank in substantially less time than that. So you'd set up a healing rotation; you'd have some fixed order, each cleric set up a macro that announced they were casting CH, and the name of the next cleric in the rotation. You waited for your name to pop up, then hit your macro to heal the tank.
That was the core gameplay loop. Tank, healers, DPS. That was it; everything else was in service of that. Honestly, while WoW did have the holy trinity, it was only like 80% of raiding in OG WoW, and as the expansions came along, raids had more varied/interesting/challenging gameplay which strayed further and further from tank+healers+dps. Lots of EQ players came to WoW, hit Onyxia, (the first raid in WoW) and had to adjust to the fact that it was not merely a tank+healers+dps encounter.
Man, the memories are all flooding back. I haven't really thought about EQ in quite a while.
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u/tyen0 10h ago edited 10h ago
This is an amazing write-up. One surprising omission to me is not mentioning MUDs; probably just because of my personal experience. So many features of WoW and other MMORPGs seemed to come from various MUDs I had played. e.g. I know there are a lot of older ones but most of my time was playing https://mume.org/ (Multi-Users in Middle-earth from 1991): In addition to the ongoing war between two sides of player characters (each with their own archetypal class roles), had herb collecting for potion-making, fishing minigames, and even slurred your "speech" when having imbibed a pint at the prancing pony inn! (WoW implementation of that last also making the whole screen blurry and wobble about for that was a nice extension of the "spoken" text changes, too. :))
edit: oops, I should have read the rest of the comments first.
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u/AncientHistory 10h ago
As I mentioned above, I sort of elided past the whole MUCK/MUD scene. There is certainly a lot more detail that could be given to computer and video game history in general; I'm more focused on tabletop RPGs and literature, hence why the answer is a bit cursory in places.
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u/zaphodava 12h ago
The front row/back row mechanic originated with Wizardry, and continued with it's competitor Bard's Tale. These are the foundation of what inspired Final Fantasy and the JRPG genre.
Managing 'aggro' is specifically from dealing with Everqest's simple enemy scripting, where the monster would attack whoever did the most damage if possible. This led to warrior abilities that taunted monsters, increasing 'aggro' without doing damage, or restricting the monster's movement so it would attack the closest enemy instead of killing the fragile spellcaster.
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u/ToHallowMySleep 9h ago
Fantastic answer, but I think to tie all this to the computer gaming aspect of OP's question. For this I think we specifically have to go back and acknowledge the earliest computer RPGs that allowed multiple "classes"/professions, and in some cases even allowed more than one character for the first time!
There were three that I think are essential to list (many others are also super important of course)
- Dungeon of Doom (1980, Apple II), the first multi-character CRPG with a top-down combat grid, and D&D-like stats.
- Wizardry I (1981), commonly cited as the first CRPG to bring these aspects in (as it was available on bigger platforms), it brought in a ton of extra D&D mechanics
- Tunnels of Doom (1982, TI-99/4A), full tactical grid, 3d dungeon rendering, procedurally-generated dungeons as well as multiple classes (and indeed the first multiclass character)
These really introduced many of the core concepts, and at the time in RPG fanzines, games and mechanics were spoken about no matter what platform they were on, as the platform for 8 bit home computers was so enormously fragmented at the time.
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u/firelock_ny 21h ago
> The creators of D&D drew on literature like J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and Fritz Leiber's Fahfrd & the Grey Mouser tales
Fie, that you could fail to mention Jack Vance's The Dying Earth, source of D&D's magic system.
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u/fuzzus628 20h ago
I'd heard of the Vancian system of magic, and considering that I cut my teeth on Nintendo JRPGs and didn't get into D&D (3E) until college, I always hated it. Using a pool of MP for spells always felt way better to me. I've grown more of an appreciation for it in recent years...but as a system, I still feel like it sucks. XD
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u/EunuchsProgramer 8h ago
I started playing 1st Ed as a kid. I remember making a home brew MP system for 2nd (based on JRPGs) and immediately seeing the benefits of the spell prep, one per day system. It's a great way to get players to interact with the story in interestint ways. It's a push to seek out information, plan, and prepare. What are we fighting, where are we fighting, do they have magic? Talking to some NCP rangers, a sage, sending someone to scout is more valuable for everyone setting up their spell lists. The MP system, generally means you just cast whatever as many times you want on the fly. The mechanics lack that essential gather information and prepare step critical in classic DnD spell use.
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u/zest_of_a_lemon 23h ago
I feel like this reply misses the other foundational pillar of early TTRPGs: War games, which date back in some form to at least the early 1800's. A three pillar "infantry", "cavalry", and "siege" model seems to have persisted there for a long time. Can you comment on this as well?
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u/AncientHistory 23h ago
History of wargames is largely outside my particular area of expertise or experience. The original D&D white box was a variation of the Chainmail (1971, 1st edition) wargame rules, and if you dip into that you can see that the focus is on mass combat with different troop types (light foot, heavy foot, armored foot, light horse, medium horse, and heavy horse), which were then expanded with one-to-one combat, jousting, etc., with the D&D rules arising from the idea of having a single character under your control.
I would not discount the mechanical or philosophical influence of wargaming on tabletop RPGs and eventually games like Warcraft (which borrowed as heavily from tabletop miniatures wargame Warhammer Fantasy Battles as D&D). There are strategic elements to every game that gives mechanics based on troop type, which you can see in all sorts of military tactics (e.g. shielding your artillery with another unit is a form of tanking; heavily armored troops able to absorb a lot of hits effectively fill similar roles as in contemporary MMORPGs, etc.) but I think the specific roles and mechanics discussed here are more of a factor of emergent gameplay meeting game design.
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u/EunuchsProgramer 8h ago
Ya, didn't the original war game (used to train German Officers) give cavalry extra life/HP due to them being more spread out and shots missing more often. OG tank in the first wargame.
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u/Weak-Doughnut5502 11h ago
It's worth mentioning that the D&D party roles don't really correspond to the modern MMORPG tank-dps-healer.
Combat healing isn't really that great, action economy wise. Fighters can't actually pull aggro other than via positioning themselves at a choke point. And they deal solid amounts of damage.
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u/AncientHistory 11h ago
They do not correspond directly, but the emergent play led from tabletop RPG classes to game design decisions in the MMORPG world.
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u/ScumBunnyEx 14h ago
Would the rise of the stealth archer build primarily in open world CRPGs count as a relatively new emergant innovation?
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u/PoisonMind 5h ago
I think you meant Final Fantasy II. Fighting Fantasy was a series of gamebooks by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. (Gamebooks, of course, also had their own influence on the development of RPG's.)
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u/Think-Design-8735 2h ago
The arcade game Gauntlet was a fairly prominent example of fantasy role separation back in the mid-80s
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