f13.net

This is the Holy Trinity.  It's more of an MMO convention, and in that sense, newer than DIKU.

That comes from D&D.

Fighter, Cleric, and ??

Mage. Them fireballs hurt.

[derail]

I would classify the trinity as CC, Damage and Heals. And the typical warrior/tank fits in the CC slot most times.

[/derail]

To make the super nested quote post....

AD&D was warrior/healer/mage/rogue as archetypes.

The Holy Trinity was from EQ1 and consisted of tank/healer/chanter.

Chicken vs egg discussion #98714987139874

GO!!!

Dude, I tried.  :oh_i_see:

SHAMBO, RIGHTEOUS MMOCOW OF THE PLAINS GIVES THIS GAME A SOLID
(http://bob.seldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/shambo.jpg)
TWO RIGHT-EAR CLIPS OUT OF $HAY

(http://www.weedguru.com/img/hamburglar.jpg)

D&D lacked a taunt mechanism, so therefore no tanking (the grid tactics of 3rd edition tried to allow for positional tanking, but that was late and ineffective against ranged attacks), so therefore no Trinity.  That was all EQ.  In D&D you had to be more clever about keeping your mage alive.

D&D didn't need a taunt mechanism cause it was adopted from Chainmail which was a miniatures game which had a built in "tanking" mechanism by virtue of your position on the grid. I.e. armored people in front, squishies in back. That's why one of the first things a DM asks your party when moving through a territory is what is your marching order.

You obviously skip over parentheticals.

No I didn't. 3E added all sorts of crap like Attacks of Opportunity but we never worried about that stuff playing D&D/AD&D. It was implicitly understood that the heavily armored people stood in front and the others in the back and the DM used common sense in situations with monsters trying to move past the front row (typically by a bonus to hit from the back).

To put it another way you are saying D&D didn't recognize "tanking" until 3E. I'm saying we were playing that way back when D&D was first released.

A more substantial reply:

Although D&D derived from a minis game, in most actual play it dropped any pretense of physical position in combat (YMMV, depending on your DM).  Most combat I participated in and saw was completely abstracted into taking turns and picking targets. . position only mattered in significant cases (being in the same room as the target) and was either in the DM's head or sketched on graph paper.  3rd edition tried to bring back more explicit tactics with all of the mini and grid rules (and therefore reach, attack of opportunity, etc), but between ranged attacks, area effect, swarms of enemies, magic, etc you need to rely on something other than 'Fighter soaks all of the attacks' to protect your squishies.

The default 'tanking' mechanism in pre-gridsheet D&D play involved the fighters running forward and 'engaging' the enemies in melee along with the DMs usually unspoken assumption that the enemy would attack someone they are 'engaged' with over another target.  The grid system encapsulated that preference in rules via attacks of opportunity.  An MMO would do well by incorporating an engagement and attacks of opportunity system over 'taunting', since it works much better for PvP (you can attack someone other than the Warrior sitting on you, but you pay a price for it).

You seem to think that there needs to be an explicit "taunt" mechanism for there to be a concept of a "tank".

OMG geekfight.

No, I'm claiming that 'tanking' in the sense we use for MMOs refers to a high-armor, high-hp character's ability to draw attacks to them, thus using their high armor and high hp to keep everyone else alive.  D&D had no mechanics for explicitly drawing attacks, but an implicit mechanism for fighters to make themselves the more appealing target by being in front.  Pre-3rd DMs generally just agreed that mobs attacked guys in front because the game broke down otherwise.  3rd and after, AoOs made it slightly more explicit.  However, there are enough non-melee damage mechanics in D&D that mages need other mechanisms to survive than the assumption that everyone will just attack the fighter.  Or to put it another way, in D&D, particularly above level 6 or so, mages draw just as many attacks as fighters.  They just survive them in different ways (resists, defensive spells, and an unspoken and surprisingly large amount of DM goodwill).  This is nothing like the Trinity, where the fighter is expected to draw all attacks.

You just agreed with my previous statement.

Nyope.  Tanking requires taking a majority (or all) of the attacks.  Taunts aren't necessary in an environment where a player can guarantee (positionally or some other mechanism) that they get the attacks.  Say, for example, a game with collision and exclusively melee attacks.  D&D was not and is not such an environment.  No tanks.

You are changing the common usage of that word when applied to RPGs for your own purposes. The term "tank" to describe heavily armored characters in RPGs was used before MMORPGs and the MUDs that preceded them were around.

I think we're going down a rathole.  The question was whether the Holy Trinity originated in D&D.  The Holy Trinity (http://www.wowwiki.com/Holy_Trinity) in MUDland is defined as a tank, which takes the damage, a priest which heals the damage, and a dps, which does the damage.  I picked up specifically on the inapplicability of the tank role to D&D.  I don't care that in other contexts 'tank' refers to people in armor.  Further, there are a hundred of other ways in which D&D play differs from Holy Trinity play, if you don't like the tank comparison.

In D&D:
The "tank", properly equipped, typically does as much damage as (and usually more than) any other class when fighting a single creature or a small number.
The "healer" wears full armor and can absorb as much damage as (or often more than) the "tank".
The "DPS", assuming you're talking mage, only out-damages the "tank" against swarms and is otherwise interested in crowd control, ranged damage, messing with the environment, audible glamers, and other kookiness.

So no, the Trinity did not originate in D&D.  It came with MUDs.

No it did not.

One could argue the original Holy Trinity came from Arthur, Merlin, and Lancelot.

Or something.

Or Jesus.

Sup. Just trolling through here. Don't mind the boat.

Who was the healer?

Jesus.

And Arthur was a paladin tank. He could lay on hands and shit. Fucking excalibur dude.

I call BS on your geek credentials, sir.

You.  Me.  1st Edition AD&D.  Temple of Elemental Evil.  High noon.  It's on.

I am literally astounded that anyone disagrees on this.  Was there some other version of D&D that everyone else played?  Does anyone think a Fighter with proficiency and spec on a bastard sword and strength bonus is doing less damage than fucking Magic Missile?  And at later levels with multiple attacks they're doing less than, what, Melf's Acid Arrow?  Wizards don't get FB/LB until, what 5th level, and then only one a day and then you only get to use it in contrived circumstances or you nuke your own party.  They're not DPS!  Clerics wear fucking plate and shield!  They don't heal until after the battle is over, because 90% of healing is touch ranged and they're too busy doing a lot of damage with their mace, Strength of Stone, and Draw Upon Holy Might to run around fucking touching everyone else in the party.  Who are you people?  I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!

You're arguing that D&D mages are underpowered relative to fighters.  Unless you put some sort of qualifier on that like "at first level," you have to turn in your geek card.

I'll concede that maybe things were different in 1st Ed.  Most of my D&D experience was 2nd ed, with a "holy quaternity" party that went from 1st level to 15th or so.  I assure you that the mage nuked the shit out of everything, be it one big thing or lots of little things, with equal effectiveness.  Fireball is not the only spell in the book.

Also, going back to the earlier slapfight, I'd argue that rogues also occupy the DPS niche as of D&D 3rd ed (being able to make continual sneak attacks against a flanked opponent).

I never said 'underpowered'.  I said they're not damage focused.  D&D, being an actual RPG, has a lot of conduits for power that have nothing to do with combat.  Like Astral Projection, and Time Stop, and Wish.  Yes, a high level mage nukes and if you call stuff like Power Word: Kill 'dps' they might even out-nuke a specialized fighter with 4 attacks a round, a magical weapon, increased crit chance, and a girdle of storm giant strength.  Maybe.  But it wouldn't be by a lot.  Certainly not enough that you'd say the mage's job is to 'do damage' and the fighter's job is to 'tank', especially when you run into magic resistance and high saves vs spell and your mage's job is mostly to not die.  Of course, none of this even deals with the fact that the most popular 1st Ed 'class' was Fighter/Mage.  So yeah.  Which part of the Trinity is that?

Pre-3rd rogues were jokes for damage unless your DM let you use poison, in which case they just instakilled everyone, and then your DM stopped letting you use poison.  Mid-combat backstabbing in 3rd screwed around with it.  Especially with the wacky new prestige classes that can 'feint' to roll to flank and backstab every round.  Still, they do less damage than a fighter.

Interestingly, in 4th ed they're moving more toward MMOG-like combat roles for classes, presumably because it will give them wow-like revenue.  Here's their breakdown:
    * Defender: Fighter & Paladin
    * Leader: Cleric & Warlord
    * Controller: Wizard
    * Striker: Rogue, Ranger, & Warlock

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAw490qUAjs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAw490qUAjs)
The clown interviewing Wyatt actually uses the phrase 'damage per second'.  Goddammit.

So MUDs may be introducing the Trinity to D&D, not the other way around.

Edit: speeling

Judas was a dirty PeeVeePee griefer.

It seems like you're primarily arguing that there are options in D&D other than the tank/DPS/healer party.  I don't disagree with that.  Doesn't change the fact that lots of people used it long before it showed up in Dikus.

Also, I'm not ever sure what version of D&D you're talking about -- one second you're talking about fighters getting four attacks per round with improving crit chances (I don't even remember crits being part of the core rules before 3rd ed), the next you're talking about rogues only getting one backstab.  There was a lot of overall stat inflation in 3rd ed so if you're comparing the 2nd ed version of one class against the 3rd ed version of another, you can make any class look like anything you want.

Holy crap you read nothing I wrote.  There is no tank/DPS/healer party in D&D.  You're misremembering.  The canonical D&D party is Fighter/Mage/Cleric/Rogue.  My /played in D&D is thousands of hours, every edition.  70% DMing.  I have no confusion about this.  Nobody in that party is DPS.  The fighter doesn't receive any more attacks than the mage does.  They are not the tank class (by the trinity definition.  You can call them tanks if you like).  Ask yourself why it was rare to run Cleric/Cleric instead of Fighter/Cleric.  It's not because they couldn't 'tank' enough.  It's because they couldn't do enough damage.  That's what fighters are and were for.


It doesn't matter.  There is no version of D&D where a fighter (assuming typical loadouts) does not lead in damage except in the most specialized environments (ranged attacks against groups). I'm not comparing cross-edition.  I pointed out that in 2nd, fighters destroyed rogues for damage, in 3rd rogues get closer.  Because you suggested that Rogues are DPS in 3rd edition.  And I forgot about fighters getting Power Attack in 3rd and the improved strength bonus to 2-handers, so no.

This conversation is petering to inanity.  There is no doubt in my mind that class roles in D&D are not similar to and were never similar to the Holy Trinity, that the Holy Trinity did not emerge from D&D mechanics (except in the most roundabout sense that D&D invented the classes that were copied and eventually came to make up the Holy Trinity), and that it emerged in environments that focus exclusively on combat and combat roles.  My understanding is that the term itself emerged during EQ1, though the mechanics that led to it -- particularly healers being suddenly weak and unable to take damage -- emerged in Dikus (see Medievia's classes here (http://www.medievia.com/classes.html)).  I feel like I've put more than enough evidence out there for my point of view, so I'm not going to keep banging the drum.  Last word's all yours.

I'm aware that there is no D&D class called "DPS".  Perhaps that's where the misunderstanding lies.   :-)


All right, I'm going to number-crunch at you.

In this corner: Bob the 10th level fighter.  He carries a longsword, which he specializes in.  His Strength is 18 and his Dex is 10.  He gets two attacks per round at +15/+10 for 1d8+6 damage a hit.
In this corner: Jim the 10th level rogue.  He carries a shortsword, which he has weapon finesse for.  His Dex is 18 and his Strength is 10.  He gets two attacks per round at +12/+7 for 1d6 damage a hit.  His sneak attack damage is +5d6.

Bob and Jim are fighting a Gray Render, which is a CR 8 monster with AC 19 and no damage reduction.  They are fighting as a team and flanking it, meaning each gets +2 to hit and Jim gets his +5d6 sneak attack damage.

Every round, Bob has an 85% chance to land his first attack and a 60% chance to land his second.  Each hit is 1d8+6 damage.  This averages to about 15 hp of damage a round.
Every round, Jim has a 70% chance to land his first attack and a 45% chance to land his second.  Each hit is 6d6 damage.  This averages to about 24 hp of damage a round.

Damage soaker winnar: Bob!
Damage output winnar: Jim!

It gets increasingly ridiculous as rogues climb in level, far quicker than the damage bonuses on a fighter's weapons do (never mind that the rogue is getting magical weapons at about the same rate, or that higher level foes with damage reduction strongly favor the rogue's fewer-hits-for-more-damage style).  The 17th level rogue in my campaign can take out almost any single foe in one round if he can get his sneak attacks off -- that's 3 attacks for 10d6+ each with no saving throw.  Of course, this doesn't work in every situation, but nothing does.   :-)

And never mind Enoch the Eldritch over there, who at 10th level can throw a couple of Baleful Polymorphs (instant "kill"), a handful of Enervations (1d4 negative levels), and all sorts of Lightning Bolts (10d6 damage) a day as long as Bob is doing a good job of covering his butt.

(edit) Of course, not every adventuring party will play this way, but it's a pretty common model from what I've seen, and it seems to be pretty effective.  I also agree that the tank/DPS/healer roles are not anywhere nearly as rigid as they are in Dikus, since every class can potentially fulfill a handful of different roles in a pinch, but each class tends to have a smaller handful of things that they tend to be the absolute best at.

 :drill:

Jesus fucking christ. This is where all the bad shit in MMORPGs come from!

Everquest could not replicate the table top gaming experience, so they sucked all the fun out of it, reduced it to numbers, like any good geek retard would, and gave us the most boring game mechanic ever invented.

It's like Jurrasic Park being used to clone the Dodo Bird.

"What has science done? Have you brought the extinct Velociraptor or mighty Tyrannosarus Rex to life?"

*Skwark!*

"Oh..."

In my day, playing D&D meant kickass stories of adventure. Not making sure the purple foozle only attacked the fighter.

Precisely.

Those numbers make me want to play a CRPG. Any CRPG. At least the computer does the calculations there!

Forget those and let's all go play Amber. Or Nobilis.

It should be about roles, not rules.

(And you should be able to "tank" if you are big and mean enough because it just makes sense. Fuck the rules if they say the opposite).

I think this entire thread was contrived to unravel sidereal's psyche.  :drill:

Otherwise, Holy Trinity pre-WoW was CC/Tank/Healer. Holy Trinity post-WoW is DPS/Tank/Healer. Depends on whether you grabbed a veteran or a post-WoW newb off the street to ask them what the Holy Trinity is (and assuming they're not Roman Catholic*).

Just realized to that while the concept of a Holy Trinity is alive and well in WoW, I don't think most people call it that. Meanwhile that was common terminology in EQ1. Odd that. Is it because most people in WoW are post WoW genre newbs?

* which I was raised as, so back off with your pitchforks and flames and shit

I kind of have to agree that I never felt that old-skool AD&D really encouraged any concept of a "tank."  Certainly in all the campaigns I played in/ran the fighters were never under the impression that their chief responsibility was to take damage, if there were even any present.

It wasn't ALWAYS the fighter who got shoved out in front of my adventuring parties... it was just whoever happened to have the heaviest armor, the most hit points, and not have any useful abilities that would be disrupted by an ill-timed poke in the ribs (like spellcasting).

 :oh_i_see:

Yeah, see that's the thing. D&D didn't require/have CC in the same sense that EQ-dikumud does.

Mage had hurty fireballs, but that wasn't a requisite.

Seconded, WoW's 'no-collision' tank made it worse. There's no blocking that goblin from your mage, just taunt or hit it harder.

To expand on what I said earlier, I always actually envisioned the fighter as the main reliable damage-dealing, ass-kicking class in D&D.  The combat specialist, if you will.  I mean, IIRC, they did pretty much do insane damage.

D&D wasn't really only about combat, after all, unlike most MMOs.  So it wasn't really imbalanced to make fighters both extremely survivable and highly damaging.

Awesome!  Numbers.
I'll renege on my pledge about the last word because actually introducing math raises it to a whole nother level. 

First, 3rd edition really isn't apropos to the original argument, since the question was whether the Holy Trinity originated in D&D pre-EQ.  3rd came out in 2000 and EQ in 1999.  But I put forth that fighters outdamage rogues in every edition, so I'll defend 3rd.

Your example ignores some fighter advantages (crits, PA, plusses, all the good minmaxers use 2H weapons these days) and exaggerates some rogue advantages (flanked SA on every hit).  Any 10th level fighter doing 15 damage a round should be dropped from the party, post-haste.  Seriously, he should take up farming.

Here's how I'd break it down:

1H Fighter:
Fighter 18S 10D Longsword +3 (+ Focus, Spec, Power Attack, Improved Crit). 
Good PA here is +4/+0, so attack boni are base 10/5 + Focus + Str + Weapon - PA for 14/13. 
Chance to hit against AC 19 is 75%/70%.  Damage is 1d8 + Spec + Str + Weapon + PA for 1d8+13/1d8+9
Chance of a crit is (improved) 20% * 75/70 for 15%/14%.  Extra damage from a crit is the same 1d8+13/1d8+9
So the average damage is 0.75 * 17.5 + 0.15 * 17.5 + 0.7 * 13.5 + 0.14 * 13.5 = 13.125 + 2.625 + 9.45 + 2.025 = 27ish

2H Fighter
Notes: PA gives a double bonus to 2H weapons.  2H Weapons get 1.5 Str bonus to damage
Fighter 18S 10D Falchion +3 (+ Focus, Spec, PA, IC). 
Good PA here is +5/+0, so attack boni are base 10/5 + Focus + Str + Weapon - PA for 13/13.
Chance to hit against AC 19 is 70%/70%.  Damage is 2d4 + Spec + 1.5*Str + Weapon + 2*PA for 2d4+21/2d4+11
Chance of a crit is (improved) 30% * 70/70 for 21/21.  Extra damage from a crit is the same 2d4+21/2d4+11
So the average damage is 0.7 * 26 + 0.21 * 26 + 0.7 * 16 + 0.21 * 16 = 18.2 + 5.46 + 11.2 + 3.36 = 38ish

Rogue w/ Sneak
Rogue 10S 18D Shortsword + 3 (+ Focus, Finesse, Improved Crit). 
Attack boni are base 7/2 + Focus + Dex + Weapon for 14/9.
Chance to hit against AC 19 is 80%/55%.  Damage is 1d6 + Weapon + Sneak for 6d6+3
Chance of a crit is (improved) 20% * 80/55 for 16/11.  Extra damage from a crit is 1d6+3 (no SA bonus on crit)
So the average damage is 0.8 * 24 + 0.16 * 6.5 + 0.55 * 24 + 0.11 * 6.5 = 19.2 + 1.04 + 13.2 + 0.72 = 34ish

Rogue w/o Sneak
Same as above except base damage
Average damage is 0.8 * 6.5 + 0.16 * 6.5 + 0.55 * 6.5 + 0.11 * 6.5 = 5.2 + 1.04 + 3.58 + 0.72 = 11ish

Note I made the crit chance independent of the initial hit chance, but I'm pretty sure it washes out in the end.  The other math was more complicated.

So a chain-sneaking Rogue does beat out a 1H fighter but is outdamaged by a properly Feated 2H fighter.  Furthermore, the Rogue is a total waste at damage if he can't sneak attack on every attack.  There are a ton of environments where a rogue can't just share an enemy with a fighter and get the sneak attacks.  He needs to take on a creature alone, it's any of the many types of creature that can't be snuck (undead, oozes, plants, constructs, immune to crits, etc), he can't get a flanking position, and so on.  How often this comes up is totally dependent on your campaign of course, but I don't think it's out of line or my experience to suggest the rogue is prevented from chain-sneaking about half the time.  Now the average damage is in the 23ish range and takes many levels to get anywhere near a 10th level fighter's 38ish. 

Follow-up question:  When it's the Render's turn, is he going to attack the squishy rogue or the plated fighter?  So which one's the tank?

Arrrrgggggghhhh!   Okay, now I'm really done.

I find this thread funny. You people rape roleplaying.

Right now I play Earthdawn as one of three players (four at times when the brother of the DM is in town). The three people - Hunter (Range Damage), Thief (Sneak Damage) and Elementalist (Range Damage).

Fights consist of killing enemies from a distance or running around screaming like little girls while the Thief tries to backstab them. Much funnier than the Holy Trinity, and PnP isn't mainly about fights anyway.

Really, you people reduce the real experience to the castrated computer versions. Why do you do that?

Who's you guys?  Just because I can do math doesn't mean that's how I create my characters. 

Most of my characters are unbalanced bards.

Let me rephrase it.

The holy trinity is - above all else - about efficiency. Even the survivability against increasingly bad odds is basically only for efficiencies sake.

Which doesn't mean dick in PnP, because thats not about the fastest ding - grats.

Ugh, i don't mean to get in on your hot and heavy geek-on-geek action, but let me just say... There is a reason why Book of the Nine Swords was released for 3.5; i have to side with Trippy and Samwise in saying that you're wrong about Fighters Sidereal. I suspect that i come nowhere near your experience with D&D, since i've only played 2'nd and 3'rd, but, Mages/Clerics > all. After the few initial levels, anything melee bar the most rediculously feated/twinked Barb is going to be shut out by ranged/magic damage. Hell, didn't someone from the other site post a Bard build that was also out-dps'ing an equal level fighter from about level 3 onwards, a little while back?

Also: Pun-Pun (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Forgotten_Freedom:Pun-Pun)

Dude you and Samwise never dare say "RPG" again. You are on probation. Double secret probation

Seeing how this discussion started with working out where"Holy Trinity" came from, not where it can be said to possibly apply...

Why the fuck are you talking about stuff post EQ which, you all see to agree, is a point in time when the term was already in use?

As someone who never pyed D&D or EQ1 I feel impartial enough to give victory to sidereal, pending any relevant (read: identifying Holy Trinity as a significant/dominant playstyle in D&D pre EQ1) responses.

This thread is now about everybody's wacky PnP adventures!

Most memorable D&D group I was in had a generic_warrior with a semi-cursed magic longsword, a paranoid megalomaniacal halfling thief, cynical dwarf cleric with a heart of...goldish (me) and an excellently RPed "high int low wis" mage (if only by coincidence).

Example of the mage's actions: We were camped out at night in a clearing in a forest where a dragon was rumoured to live. The second watch heard a leathery creaking-flapping noise circling around from the sky above - fading, getting stronger, disappearing, reappearing, etc. Dark, cloudy night so nobody could see what was making the noise. Whole party gets woken up and starts trying to figure out what's going on.

The mage, skimming through the spells he has memorized, realizes that he doesn't have any light spells ready. He does, however, have Glitterdust (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/glitterdust.htm). It went something like this:

Mage: OK, I cast glitterdust
DM: Er...at what?
Mage: Straight up, to try and hit whatever it is that's flying around up there.
DM: Are you sure?
Mage: I don't have a light spell memorized but this should work.
DM: OK. What are the rest of you doing?
Thief & my cleric simultaneously: Running out of the clearing and into the woods.
Warrior, a couple of seconds of thought later: Yeah, that.
Mage: ...um?
DM: OK. Right, mage: your glitterdust spell goes off, firing into the air above you but not hitting anything.
Mage: Oh, ok then. Now I'll...
DM: Then gravity takes over and the cloud of glitter rains down into the clearing, making everything inside glowing & sparkly. Including yourself. The two wyverns that were flying overhead hunting for food are attracted by this display and land, turning towards you. Everybody roll for initiative.

 :awesome_for_real:

The holy trinity came from the mind of min-maxers, or how they were called in former time - munchkins.

Really, this is not even a question. And it is not at all reliant on the actual system.

Ok I need to call shenanigans on this. 

1)  I'll happily take the nerd D&D pepsi challenge with you.  I have been playing D&D since pre-first edition.  Back when D&D and AD&D were different entities and everyone was stoked about running through B2: The Keep on the Borderlands.

2)  Ever since we started playing we always, always, always played with miniatures/chits and on a grid like surface.  The technology has advanced somewhat over the years (I use a dry erase "board" now) but I feel we were the norm, not the exception.

3:  If your fighters were out damaging your wizards at any point in any ediition, than you have some very, very terrible wizards, or you were playing the game only up to 5th level.  High level spellcasters RULE the damage game, so much so that they are being substantially downgraded in 4th edition.  i don't care how many attacks joe barbarian is doing per round at (1d12(Greataxe)+5(magic weapon)+1d6(elemental weapon)+4 (rage strength bonus) +15 (30 strength with two handed weapon). You are still avergaing 30-40 per hit if every hit conects.  I had Red wizards doing hundreds of points of damage to multiple targets in single rounds.  In earlier editions the differences were even more pronounced, where fighters rarely had more than 2 attacks per rounds and wizards could shapechange into Red Dragons and such.

Now, the nice thing about fighters is that they could keep going and going (assuming they could stay healed).  But at later levels wizards usually had enough spells and did enough damage that it wasn't a problem.

Jeezus, nerd rage galore.

Holy Trinity pre-WoW was CC/Tank/Healer
Holy Trinity post-WoW is DPS/Tank/Healer

Me despises Holy Trinity hooga-booga.

Me liked in UO when everyone was able to do everything.

And yes, I'm serious. No more contrived and obligatory roles in a group.

Thats because in EQ there really was a holy trinity of classes in warrior/cleric/enchanter that had to be in every single group, in wow for regular grouping theres three tank classes, four healing classes and every single class can dps and has some form of cc.  So the "holy trinity" is more of an abstract concept rather than the three specific classes every single group had to have in order to be efficient in EQ.

Earthdawn was one of the greatest RPGs I got to GM. Awesome setting, interesting ruleset, and much RPing and good storytelling abounded.

I'm seriously with you. Creating interdependency by making every class able to do only one damn thing is madness, and led us down this grim path of boring gameplay.

Right, if you didn't have the Holy Trinity in your group in EQ1 then you didn't have a group.  You were at best relegated to dorking around on yard trash while you got whichever holy trinity member you were missing.  That's it.  End of story.

Wow doesn't have that paradigm, EQ2 doesn't have it, and D&D or AD&D certainly didn't have it.

Pika-wa?  You see what you did here, right? I mean, I hope you do.   If not, you just compared a fighter with a whole bunch of gear and bonus-boosting shit to a mage who, apparently, woke up naked and with one spell memorized.

Also, D&D Wasn't about "DPS" because fucking monsters didn't have 32k hit points to chew-through for 10-20 minutes.   Fights were about the Killing blow, not DPS.  Boom, headshot.  Casters did this very effectively and without attack rolls.  Attack rolls were WHY fighers get so much +attack and so many more attacks/ round.. because dice suck and (unless you were playing munchkin land) even a THAc0 of 15 (your 5th level fighter) with a +4 to attack meant you were missing more than you were hitting on attacks.   Fuck, even Rogues killed effectively IF THEY WERE PLAYING ROGUES and being sneaky and shit.


That said, the "Trinity" evolved out of HP mechanics and inability to creativly use spells in text-based systems.  You coudln't really use cool things like ice floors and rivers of sand or blade-barriers and magical hands without them simply being "Yet another +/- damage ability" Fights became "Epic" not because you had to be creative/ resourceful to beat them, but because you had to focus for long periods and have the resources (HP/ Damage pool) to survive them.  Yawn.  (And why I enjoy MOST of the WoW bosses, but some DO drag on too long.)

  Computers have evolved, which is why I'd like to see folks abandon the HP/ Stat barrier.  However, since so many 'designers' were weaned on D&D and MUDs it's not happening any time soon.. and we're passing these expectations on to the next genration.

It was certainly not a requirement in D&D as it became in Dikus, but that doesn't mean the concept of "this guy stands in front and tries to absorb the brunt of the attack, this guy stands in back and tries to do as much damage as possible, this guy tries to keep everybody healed up" didn't exist prior to EQ.

As ratman said, EQ basically took one aspect of D&D, amplified it, reduced it to numbers, and then made that the entire game.  Claiming it actually brought something new to the table is giving it credit it doesn't deserve.

(edit) To put it in one sentence: EQ did not invent the Holy Trinity, it simply made it mandatory.

I don't think AD&D or pencil+paper role-playing really invented anything regarding "tanking" though.  The things people are describing (having the big armored guy stand in front while you shoot things at the dudes) are just things that you actually would do in the real world.  We may have done it in AD&D, but only because that's what one would actually do in that situation.  I really do think it's fair to say that EQ (or some sort of MUD, but I don't recall seeing it until EQ) originated "tanking" as a game mechanic, for better or for worse.

I may be in the minority I guess, but I didn't really consider AD&D a "game" in the mathematical sense like I consider MMOs.  Like I said before, imbalanced stuff didn't really matter as much in D&D because you weren't trying to play a formal game.  AD&D was more of a toy from my perspective.

edit:  This is all pretty much semantics, of course... we can all pretty much define holy trinities and tanking however we wish, it's not like there's a formal definition.  But debates about semantics are fun.

This thread made my eyes bleed a little bit.  :uhrr:

I picked a lock with a gnome once. I rolled four 20s and a 19 to do it.  :drill:

I hesitate to ask, but... was it a gnome-sized lock, or did you use a particularly small and slender part of the gnome to do the picking?   :ye_gods:

It wasn't a Holy Trinity until it became mandatory.  Prior to that it was just 'nice to have'.  EQ created the Holy Trinity because EQ required those three specific classes the rest of the posturing in this thread is just evasive semantics to avoid having to admit error.

edit: The Holy Trinity was 3 specific classes.  Warrior, Cleric and Enchanter.  I certainly played plenty of P&P sessions without one, two or even three of the classic D&D archtypes in the session.

To me it seems  :uhrr: to give EQ credit for inventing a particular (preexisting) mechanic simply because it didn't support anything else.  But if the commonly accepted definition of "Holy Trinity" is specific to its presence in EQ, then I agree the whole discussion is  :uhrr: anyway.  I never played EQ so my grasp of the  :uhrr: terminology is apparently lacking.

I think I agree with Samwise in this argument because in every D&D group I've ever played in, fighters, paladins, rangers, or (insert high hp class here) were considered necessary to surviving an encounter. Healers were of course common sense, and everything else was considered damage/CC/removal. The difference between then and now is that the concept back then was instinctual, not confined to neat terminology like "Holy Trinity" or "Tank/DPS/Heals"

What EQ did was split the tanking concept into two more defined roles: Mitigation and Aggro control. As has been mentioned before, in AD&D aggro control was very limited and dependent on positional tactics or roleplaying. In practice at the higher levels it was almost impossible thanks to abilities like flight, teleport, enemy CC abilities etc.

So I think Sideral is correct in the sense that that the tank as we know it today with aggro tools did not exist, but the concept of a high defense high hit point character to take the hits that squishies couldn't was most definitely there.

Diku tanking = ability to attract mob damage.  Survivability is secondary. That is the healer's job. There are two ways to attract mob damage: taunts to manage aggro, buffs to manage aggro and dps. That's it. If there is no game mechanic to allow a PC to consistently attract mob damage, then there can be no tanks. Yes, diku tanks have more hps and damage mitigation due to equipment but a plate fighter who cannot hold aggro - i.e. attract a majority of the mob's damage - is not a useful tank even if his class was intended as a tank. The aggro mechanic defines whether tanking exists or not.

D&D has never had an aggro mechanic since the DM can make any NPC attack any PC he wants, therefore tanking emerged post-D&D.

Now, MUDs had lots of classes. In order to make all of those classes attractive to players, devs had to vest various "jobs" in them. There is no other way to differentiate in a text only game. Tanking was and is a key mechanic in diku systems. Therefore the tank classes have to have some drawbacks or everyone would pick it or healing. So, tanks have lower dps to balance the fact that you need at least one in every group. But if the tank has low dps and the healer is healing the tank, combat will suck because it will take too long so the other classes get high dps to make them attractive to include in a group. But high dps means higher aggro generation which means a better tank (attracting the majority of the mob's damage) so the devs have to punish that dps somehow: squishiness.  Tanks needed something to offset the aggro of higher dps so they got taunts and healers had to have some danger so healing behaved like dps. Balance achieved.

Bottom line is that if groups don't have the tools AND the need to manage aggro, then combat becomes boring because everyone just mashes all their buttons to kill the mob as fast as possible since in that model everyone will have similar dps. If the threat of defeat is minimal and/or random, it is not fun. So devs have to carefully balance the aggro system so that it is neither kindergarten easy nor random.

UO was (and may still be) a game with seemingly random aggro. It has been a long time since I played but I remember mobs sticking to whomever landed the first blow but there was also plenty of aggro ping-pongi via dps. So despite my description  above that devs must have believed random aggro to be not fun, I found UO combat fun. If aggro was random in EQ it would not have been fun. Everyone would have played a wizard and just nuked the mob as hard as possible and let the random number generator determine if someone was going to die, and if so, whom.

I'm reminded of the comments that people make about mob AI being no match for player intelligence.

And yet if you take out the threat/aggro mechanic, the whole game comes crashing down.

 :uhrr: :oh_i_see:

You didn't need a lack of aggro to crash UO AI. You just needed some easles :-) I still laugh that they banned for monster blocking well in advance of actually, ya know, fixing monster blocking.

Nick? Is that you?

I actually played a mage like that. In fact, I played him so well that they lowered my wisdom further to keep it in tune with the total cluelessness of my mage. (I did get an int boost for it).

Seriously, though, DPS and tanking and all that shouldn't even be on the table for a properly run P&P game. Sure, you need to be able to KILL something at times -- but I've never run a P&P game that felt anything at all like DIKU, except for the swords and sorcery bit.

You all are a bunch of carebears. Bring back freak air-lock permadeath accidents during Character Creation alla Traveler 1st ed. Byiotch!

I always liked the rolemaster system, although it suffered from excessive table-litis in the combat mechanics. That did allow it to represent that heavy armor causes you to take more hits (low evasion) for less damage and criticals, though even the best armor would allow for a weakspot being found. Likewise the character creation system gave you a number of points and a template, if you wanted your mage to learn how to handle a sword you could, but it would be harder than it was for someone who specialised in that sort of thing. This made the class more about a set of strengths than a straitjacket, Fallout did pretty much the same in CRPG's.

Ultima I didn't like, with such a small number of skills allowed per character and some of them being so vital to survival (weapon skill, armor skill, magery, melee or magician energy regen) it felt very constrained.

I do miss PnP, strong positional mapping plus a lot of freedom in action made for some interesting battles. But MMORPG's are just so much more convenient, and mean someone doesn't have to sink huge amounts of time into DM'ing.

If you like PnP I have not enough good things to say about the Star Wars: Saga ruleset.  They really streamlined d20 and it is a blast to play and GM.   It is so intuitive I actually got my wife to play with us.

The DM had us in a giant's house-type-castle-thingy. It was a gnome sized lock. He didn't survive, and we hated the guy because he was annoying so we left him for dead and forced him to reroll.

Was your character a giant, or an exceptionally strong human, or what?  Or did you rend the gnome into more manageable pieces before using him to pick the lock?

Oh my gods!  My off-hand comment spawned this monstrosity.

For what it's worth, I consider the origin to (mostly) be EQ1 because that is when it became manditory to have "the Holy Trinity".  Sure some of the individual concepts were out there in DnD and MUDs, however a solo player or party could get by with what everyone found fun to play.  The nickname exists because the Trinity was required to do anything.

Also, multi-classing was completely ignored to this point.  That alone removes the need for three very specific characters to fullfil set roles.

This was like the geek equivalent of mutually assured destruction in action.

In the end we are left to adapt to a bizarre and transformed landscape of a thread where biker gangs with mohawks terrorize the countryside and locks are picked by offensive humanoids.

But back to the topic, I think you can look at D&D and MUDs and CRPGs as having included the "holy trinity," discussed here, though not in name. After all, you always preferred that Orc#3 would try to hit your barbarian instead of your wizard regardless of if you were playing Might and Magic, D&D 1st Edition, or some random Diku. You always took a healer with you, and (in most games,) some class that could do enough damage to justify its low survivability.

However, it was really the competition and catassery that EQ1 encouraged, along with it being an accepted standard shared in a large enough social network that crystallized the concept and established the tactics, which in term inspired the later game design that required the behavior, and (I suggest,) led to the phrase being used to describe the basic "thing you do to win."

So basically, are we asking where the term came from, or where the concept came from? The term comes from EQ1, while the concept of combined arms is as old as organized warfare. But that might be getting a little far from a discussion of video games.

I has a question for UO players.

I have only ever played diku derived PvP MMOs. This means that I find group PvP to be exciting because there are many different roles that have to be satisfied simultaneously with competency in order to be effective. I always saw this as a good thing, as I tend to play with competent people.

What's PvP like if you throw the trinity out the window?

A lot more fun. See EVE.

and like most small company RPGs it got totally fucked up by its publisher.

I never really liked D&D because it severely limited the ability to customize your character. Rise a level, get some hitpoints, sometimes a stat rises by +1, rinse repeat.

I think most D&D players's heads would explode if they ever played something like The Dark Eye 3rd Edition or Earthdawn.

Unfortunately D20 was the deathknell to many small independent RPGs. 7th Sea got converted to D20 (blasphemy), Earthdawn is essentially dead, Deadlands also.

Somebody else knows 7th Sea? My Ussuran Trader is impressed!

Yup. Two things kill PvP. Levels and PvE party roles.  :drill:

7th Sea is a great example that the system has to fit to the setting. Epic swashbuckling battles where you swung from chandeliers while fighting hordes of minions and fast gameplay all fit very well to the setting. I never got why they had to convert it to D20. D20 sucked all of the fun out of 7th Sea.

Deadlands without the poker deck would be only half as much fun to play. Earthdawn is the best system for group play. Every character sucks on his own, only by using the synergies of the group can you succed and so on.

D20 and the OGL killed a lot of great smaller systems.

Think positive - the founder of FASA bought back MechWarrior, Crimson Skies and Shadowrun from Microsoft a few weeks back and as Shadowrun was a (possible) future for Earthdawn it's not impossible that he'll buy back Earthdawn at some point.

Did you ever decided to empirically test the deformability of the AoE of the fireball spell by using it inside an inn's (small) public bar?  :uhrr:

Roles don't really work well in PvP except for the clearly defined DPS and Healing. There's no real taunt system, and tanks are somewhat at a continual disadvantage unless they've got a bunch of items that can break the rolling CCs. You want to kill stuff fast, and everyone is capable of doing that to a degree, even people who are otherwise told to stand in front to taunt and soak.

I actually enjoy it alot, but only when I'm done leveling. In my opinion, PvP in a DIKU works best when the levels don't factor into the fight. But unfortunately this is at odds with one of the proven methods to retain accounts. So until someone points out the obvious (that Eve has even better retention than any DIKU), we're stuck in this PvE-until-the-fun-stuff mode ala Shadowbane without the sb.exe. Or the Korean grinds.

Wow somebody who isn't a moron when it comes to pvp?  We're damn close to 10 people I bet!@!!  Its not even just levels, its the idea that a LXX can't even be touched by a LXX-20 and if he is touched the bullet/sword/axe/fire will bounce off him because he's that much more ub3r.  Great game design there guys.  :awesome_for_real:

Well, that's what I meant when I said levels kill PvP. Arguably, it kills immersion in PvE as well, when it takes 20 guys beating on an alligator for a half hour to kill it.  :ye_gods: :uhrr:

I disagree.

Tanking is gone,  but effective groups employ roles.

DAoC 8v8: 

DPS,  Healing, CC in the early days.  Moved to DPS (tank train), Healing (main healers), Interrupts (bard spamnesia, thurg, healers).  Diseasers and snarers were sometimes big.  Many groups employed a full time pealer,  a melee class with a stun or snare style,  to delay or hold down the main assist/tank train.

Hell,  TF2:

DPS + healing.  Soldiers and demos are used as suppression/diversion (CC) as much as damage.  Spys to incapicated sentries (CC?)  or hit a couple on the back line as distraction for the rush.

If you need specific classes in a P&P RPG you should kick your GM in the nuts.

Tanks are pretty powerful in group PvP in EQ2. Taunts in EQ2 work to force the person to target you. In hectic open world PvP an AOE taunt can totally save a healer can often turn the tide of the battle. A lot can happen in the few seconds until people can reacquire the right target.

While I agree that it's a valid tactic, and it's kind of reminiscent of target jamming in Eve, the sheer quality and quantity of CC in games like WoW and DAOC means that a player can wind up spending a lot of his PvP time "waiting to die". It's a very frustrating situation when it happens.

Heh. I find it funny to imagine a "tank" in a table-top game; that is, if we're saying tanks are there to soak up damage. If I was a warrior, and someone told me "It's your job to get hurt and maybe die," I think I'd smack him. If someone was playing a character who did have a penchant for letting things hurt him, I think that character would have died at like 11 or 12, after jumping into a pit of alligators.

A good point. But then, you don't spend months and months directly building TF2 DPSer and Healer. I am still a bit unsure on what those unlockable abilities do, but if I understand correct, they don't nearly have the impact on your character as some new ability or piece of gear for your classic MMORPG toon. Your Healer has that gun (with the secondary ability), those darts, and the hack saw thingy. That's it, forever.

Your DAoC thing is closer I think. I haven't been in WoW BGs since before the expansion launched, but stuff like that did happen.

So awright, there is roles :-)

No, although my absolute favorite combat took place in a small inn and DID involve a fireball. The party rogue and I decided to have an alternate universe duel while the GM was setting up, and given the fact that I was NOT a combat mage I was given a scroll of time stop to help out.

It was a very good lesson on "Why Magic Missile is the spell to use on rogues, and not, for instance, FUCKING FIREBALLS." Also a good lesson in "Fireball shaping in small areas".

Fucking evasion.

Ain't that the truth! (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0518.html)

Everybody's a tank-mage.

No way!  Everyone would be a diverse build of varying degrees and the 'tyrrany' of class-based gaming would die!  You seem to be implying that everyone would migrate to 2-3 'optimized' skill builds, enforcing a class-based system in all but name and actually LIMITING the # of playability options (from a metagame standpoint) vs a class-based system.

Surely not!

Well, it's either that or tamer-fag.

In my group's mage's defence, it was  :ye_gods: o'clock in the morning and the taproom door had just previously been kicked open by a marauding band of cut-throats, bandits and other ne'er-do-wells who were now standing around the small room and demanding the inn's takings.
To be fair to me, also contained within the small room were the rest of the adventuring party, a couple of unconscious-from-the-turnip-cider locals, and the innkeeper's wide & daughter (both being held hostage by the aforementioned thugs).

Luckily we managed to pull off some amazing heroics to (mostly) protect the innocents in the room, and my cleric was also pretty much fireproof to boot (being a priest of the Dwarven god of the Forge had its perks).

In an old second edition game, my cohort the mage didn't bother with trifling matters such as room volume or my position in it.  I quickly invested in fire (and magic) protection as best I could.  He did the same almost as quickly.

Forget you ever played a MUD.
Forget you ever played DnD.
Read some books.  Not Tolkien, but off the wall, bargin bin crap that noone looks to for inspiration.  Seriously.
Kick roles out the window.
Kick levels out the window.
Make cool professions or classes or subprofessions or subclasses that have leanings towards roles, but aren't pigeonholed into it -or- or clearly defined by it unless by player choice.
Disguise XP in such a manner that you get points in specific item usage a la UO or any other game that rewards specific xp for specific item usage.  You use it?  You get better at it.  If you get 30 points in daggers (or pistols), you have 30 points in pistols to spend on specials.  Have equipment degredation over time to help prevent bots (which you absolutely cannot prevent anyway, you can only curb it, and slow it down through various measures), but make items repairable until they reach zero condition.  At zero, they break, and you're fucked.
Realize that players will break your 'balance' within 30 minutes of seeing the layout of skills and professions.  Make it fun first, balance a distant second.  Balance is a myth.  You can't balance one player being better than another.  Make the math balanced, be done with it.

Probably niche.  But it would be fun for me.

When I was a teenager and couldn't be arsed to actually go through all the crap it took to make a P&P game happen, two or three of us would play what we called, "Dude's World".  Really it was just interactive story telling, anything goes but make it cool kind of stuff.

I remember details from some of those sessions way clearer than most of the marathon P&P, books, charts and screens and etc evenings.

All these years I thought the that holy trinity was sex drugs and rock 'n roll...

That's why you kill the lights and go in with night vision goggles and supressed Seburo J9ses. Nothing fucks up a cutthroat's day like a dime-sized entry hole from some hot 4.6mm APDS.

This actually happened in one of my AD&D campaigns.