- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Three points I'd like to make. First, "D&D has always had problem X" is, by itself, a poor justification for X. But that's the boring point.
The way you're treating genre is kind of odd, in a way that makes it not jive with the argument spacemonkey is actually making. Yes, there are many features of D&D that make it unlike most pre-D&D fantasy, but most of those lie in mechanics rather than tone. And that's going to take some explaining.
Point 2
For this post, when I say "mechanics," I don't mean the rules of the game. Obviously, trying to separate those from a game's tone is only useful if you're trying to bury criticism of the rules. What I mean is the rules of the setting. There's overlap, obviously; Vancian magic is an aspect of both the game's rules and the setting's mechanics. But there's a point to the distinction, which I hope will be clear once I explain what I do mean by mechanics.
Obviously, there are questions of how the setting works on a metaphysical level. That's the setting's rules for spellcasting, gods, monsters, alternate realities, whether there's some nebulous force that prevents technology from working because the author can't be arsed to consider how technological development would impact the world, etc. But I'm also talking about things that happen within that setting, particularly how its social institutions work. The type(s), number, and character of polities; the existence/treatment of people living outside such polities; the influence of other organizations, such as churches and guilds; culture and religion; and so forth.
Now, in these regards, D&D is in many ways peculiar. It's not unique, and I'm not just talking about D&Derivative RPGs. For instance: I've seen several people argue that the social mechanics of D&D draw heavily from portrayals of American "Manifest Destiny" as portrayed by the Western genre (which I haven't been able to find, thanks to how many people share ideas about bringing Saloons & Sheriffs into Dungeons & Dragons). This is one thing which sets it apart from most high fantasy, but it's hardly unique! That plot framework, of "civilized" people conquering"untamed wilderness," is present in a wide variety of fantasy books, from The Goblin Wood (which tells that story from the perspective of the people living in the "wilderness") to like half of isekai light novels (in the same dungeon-crawling monster-fighting variation that D&D pioneered).
Now, these mechanics are obviously part of genre. Look at the division between hard and soft sci-fi, for instance; the simplest definition of these two sci-fi subgenres is 100% mechanical. One follows real science, the other doesn't. But that's not the only thing separating the two; probing the edges of both subgenres, you'll find "hard science fiction" that has things like warp gates, FTL travel, and sometimes even psychic powers, and "soft science fiction" that sticks to the laws of physics (albeit often at a layperson level). Why is that? Why do Tunnel in the Sky and Ender's Game feel more like hard science fiction than Blade Runner? Tone.
Hard science fiction isn't just soft science fiction with a college degree. Hard sci-fi tends to be grittier, to focus on conflicts grounded in practical concerns; mechanical issues, economic/industrial impact, geopolitical concerns. Soft sci-fi, by contrast, tends to use its more arbitrary mechanics to explore more abstract sci-fi concepts. Blade Runner's replicants and vague "off-world colonies" are far more plausible than ansibles or Ramsbotham jumps, but it's focused on what it means to be human, while TitS is focused on wilderness survival in a verisimilitudinous alien world and Ender's Game feels like a deconstruction of alien invasion narratives. Yeah, the latter also have themes, but they're rooted in hard sci-fi conflicts.
My point is that while D&D has different setting mechanics than most fantasy, it has much the same tone. It's hard to build a wizard who works like Gandalf, a barbarian who works like Conan, or a cleric that works like Aqua (let's ignore how two of those examples are technically divine beings), but it's easy to run a D&D campaign with a tone and plot like Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian, or Konosuba.
And while setting mechanics are traditionally weighted pretty heavily when defining speculative fiction genres, I think that's dumb. For one thing, it's a core part of why certain bookstores lumping sci-fi and fantasy into one section; there's a lot of books that have both sciencey mechanics and magicky ones, so instead of litigating where you should put any given book, lump it all together under "nerd shit". Even though there are a lot of significant differences between the themes and narratives of sci-fi and fantasy, in how they construct their worlds and characters, in the conflicts they use, etc etc...but that's getting off topic.
The point is, D&D is only "unique" in the least important parts of genre.
Point 3
We also need to ask: What relevance does genre have to spacemonkey's point?
So, the argument is that since D&D is a different fantasy genre than anything else, it doesn't have and shouldn't support the same archetypes as other fantasy series. This is demonstrably false.
First off, archetypes can be shared between genres, even when you're not splitting hairs between D&D and, I dunno, Skyrim. For instance, the D&D paladin class corresponds to an archetype of righteous warriors with firm moral codes and holy powers, which can be found everywhere from Arthurian literature to isekai anime to The Stormlight Archive to (arguably) Star Wars—and of course, countless RPGs, tabletop and video alike. The paladin class was inspired by these holy knights, these stars so brightly shining; both D&D and its inspirations continued to inspire more like them, across all forms of fantasy. The same is true of rangers, of barbarians, monks, warlocks, and so forth.
For that matter, it's true of antagonists, too; the Monster Manual has a bunch of weird unique stuff, but that's hardly unique to D&D, and the MM also has plenty of archetypical monsters. You've got Lovecraft-lite slimy sea abominations, you've got demon-like monsters of stripes, big dumb animals for filler battles, undead overlords, magical experiments gone wrong (or right and bound to evil mages), and of course dragons. And the non-monster antagonists match to typical fantasy fare, too; demonic cults, hordes of "savages," necromancers and other dark mages, enemy armies, etc, etc.
Even if we accept that the differences between D&D and other fantasy works are significant enough to qualify as a different genre of fantasy, it's entirely possible for those genres to share tropes. And they do! D&D can hold basically any fantasy trope your DM doesn't explicitly forbid, with the arguable (but advisable) exception of Chosen Ones and other plotlines which center on a single protagonist.
You can't replicate the mechanics of most fantasy stories in D&D, but the archetypes spacemonkey is talking about barely interact with those mechanics (beyond, for instance, "some kind of spells exist"). Those archetypes are shared between non-D&D fantasy and D&D...because that's what every generation of D&D writers, from Gary Gygax himself, were trying to do. They were trying to do other things, of course, but they were also trying to make D&D a game where you can create a fantasy hero and play a fantasy narrative (or small-scale fantasy wargame, in the earliest days).
That's why some of its classes are so idiosyncratic. The monk has never had a well-defined mechanical niche, but it represents an archetype that has only gotten more popular over the years (I blame anime). As I understand it, the original ranger was little more than a collection of things Aragorn/Strider did, at least in part designed for players who wanted to play that kind of character. The distinction between a paladin and a fighter/cleric boils down to a few utility abilities and flavor. Warlocks were the only 3.5 splatbook class to survive to 5e (and made it to 4e before barbarians, bards, druids, or sorcerers) in part because they represented a certain type of edgy adolescent power fantasy better than any other class. (It certainly wasn't their unique non-Vancian magic, which 5e cuts back as much as it can without making it just another caster...)
So D&D is clearly designed to enable this kind of heroic fantasy, and its classes are (in part) designed to let players play certain fantasy archetypes. They can't play Gandalf, but they can play a wise old mage. The classes were designed to let players play these archetypes, which I know because...hold on, let's see if I can find a link...I know I read a web article where the author talked about how a feat that let wizards cast in heavy armor might be balanced, but it would still be bad for flavor, so they wouldn't do it...
This would be a lot easier to find if WotC kept 15-year-old articles about a dead edition of D&D online for both people who still care about them. I know why they don't do that, I'm just saying.
Anyways, you can also tell by looking at the classes. So many of D&D's class design decisions only make sense if you either assume the designers were designing with those archetypes in mind, or assume the developers were blindly copying decisions made by previous editions (without questioning either why those editions made those decisions, or the changes made each edition).
- Why is "Angry Fighter" a separate class from Fighter? Because they're different warrior archetypes, one primal and unrefined, the other well-trained and clad in steel.
- Why are warlocks arcane spellcasters when they are given power by a patron—and why is there overlap between these patrons and the divine beings that grant spells? Because warlocks represent magicians who gained power from Faustian bargains, and clerics represent holy/profane men empowered by their deities—different archetypes, but ones which overlap in "mechanics".
- Why do monks exist? Because Jackie Chan and Goku are cool.
It's designed to be a noob-friendly TRPG, something people new to the hobby can pick up and play with as little friction as possible. That is, I'd argue, why D&D is suited to making its character classes so archetypical. Those archetypes give even the greenest players a basis for understanding what classes do and how to play them; Tiny Tim might not know a d20 from a d12, but they've played enough Final Fantasy to know that bards are spoony. Or more practically, they can intuit that rogues are flimsier than fighters but might be good at surprise attacks, before they learn what a hit die or sneak attack is.
This intuition is important! It's like turning every fantasy book/anime/video game a new player has consumed into a tutorial for their first character. But this only works if following those archetypes is actually a good guide for playing a character. And I will give WotC this: It's generally not a bad guide. It makes you overlook some good builds, but it's fine. The problem spacemonkey points out isn't crippling the game.
But it is present, and I hope 5.5 makes it less significant.
