I've got a new post up at KillTenRats.com: In Defense of the Tankmage. Take a look if you're interested in game balance and the idea of classless systems.
I think it's important to distinguish what's acceptable in MMOs, where gamist philosophy rules supreme, and tabletop, where narrativist does. Things that work well in tabletop games simply do not work well in large scale MMOs, to the point that I wish RPG had never been appended to the end of them. MMOs attract gameplayers, not roleplayers, for the most part, as evidenced by the number of fully populated RP servers versus the number of all other fully populated servers in WoW. Most folks aren't there for role-playing. I know I'm not. If I want to roleplay, it will be with a group of folks I actually, you know, want to spend time with every weekend or every other weekend.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about games where "everybody can do everything." In the example I used, City of Heroes, each powerset has 9 powers in it, with the incidental power pools like Flight, Leaping, and Teleportation having 4. Over the course of their entire career, a character can pick 24 powers. Even if you let the player pick from 6 major pools, they still have to pick and choose what they want, so if they want Laser Eye Beams and Frost Breath on their primarily Super Strength/Invulnerability character, they're going to have to skimp somewhere else, like being weak against Magic and Sonics because they couldn't pick up one of their shields. It's just that, as it stands now in that game, there are sub-optimal picks based entirely on what class that you choose. For example, if you pick a tanker (think Superman) you are actually going to end up doing less damage than a scrapper (sort of Batman) solely based on the fact that they felt they needed a classical MUD/MMO "tank" in the game, and chose to give the Invulnerability and Super Strength powersets to them.
What sense does it make that, in most MMOs, the guy in heavy armor with the biggest weapon ends up doing less damage than half of the other characters, while the lightly armored guy with the dagger is consistently at the top of the damage charts? It's like that because, unlike in tabletop, there's no good way to make it so that rogues are useful to a group, but not absolutely necessary. And given that pickup groups in MMOs often end up being two fighters, a mage, a druid, and a paladin, forcing character choices in party make-ups just don't work to do anything but irritate most players. For the same reason, paladins in WoW are not very good at most things precisely because there's not that GM intervention in the game that makes D&D paladins work; there's no way to say, "Hey! You're not acting like a paladin, no powers for you," so they instead weaken their abilities across the board.
There's nothing wrong with character specialization, and there's everything right with making sure that each character has some weaknesses. However, when you end up with classes that can be better defined by what they should be, rather than what they actually are (WoW's paladins, CoH's tankers), something has gone wrong. Beyond that, when it's the case that you can reliably guess how every single fighter in a given role is going to be specced and geared (or at least wants to be geared), you've taken specialization too far to the extreme.
And to be clear, I'm not talking about games where "everybody can do everything." In the example I used, City of Heroes, each powerset has 9 powers in it, with the incidental power pools like Flight, Leaping, and Teleportation having 4. Over the course of their entire career, a character can pick 24 powers. Even if you let the player pick from 6 major pools, they still have to pick and choose what they want, so if they want Laser Eye Beams and Frost Breath on their primarily Super Strength/Invulnerability character, they're going to have to skimp somewhere else, like being weak against Magic and Sonics because they couldn't pick up one of their shields. It's just that, as it stands now in that game, there are sub-optimal picks based entirely on what class that you choose. For example, if you pick a tanker (think Superman) you are actually going to end up doing less damage than a scrapper (sort of Batman) solely based on the fact that they felt they needed a classical MUD/MMO "tank" in the game, and chose to give the Invulnerability and Super Strength powersets to them.
What sense does it make that, in most MMOs, the guy in heavy armor with the biggest weapon ends up doing less damage than half of the other characters, while the lightly armored guy with the dagger is consistently at the top of the damage charts? It's like that because, unlike in tabletop, there's no good way to make it so that rogues are useful to a group, but not absolutely necessary. And given that pickup groups in MMOs often end up being two fighters, a mage, a druid, and a paladin, forcing character choices in party make-ups just don't work to do anything but irritate most players. For the same reason, paladins in WoW are not very good at most things precisely because there's not that GM intervention in the game that makes D&D paladins work; there's no way to say, "Hey! You're not acting like a paladin, no powers for you," so they instead weaken their abilities across the board.
There's nothing wrong with character specialization, and there's everything right with making sure that each character has some weaknesses. However, when you end up with classes that can be better defined by what they should be, rather than what they actually are (WoW's paladins, CoH's tankers), something has gone wrong. Beyond that, when it's the case that you can reliably guess how every single fighter in a given role is going to be specced and geared (or at least wants to be geared), you've taken specialization too far to the extreme.
(continued)
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