Friday, September 5, 2008

An Adventurer Is You!: RPG Archetypes in Granado Espada

While browsing the myriad fun pages at the Television Tropes & Idioms Wiki [one of my most favorite Websites], I ran across their Tabletop Games section, where one of the listed tropes was An Adventurer Is You. Basically, this trope references the typical character classes found in most tabletop role-playing games. The compilers of the wiki narrowed down the basic classes to the following:

The Tank - which now comes in two major flavors: the meat shield a/k/a lots of HP and lots of defensive abilities; and the "evasion tanks" who survive the harm that they attract by evading instead of absorbing.

The Healer - pretty much self-explanatory. Resurrects, heals, and bestows helpful statuses and buffs. A variant would be the Healer who doubles as a Tank by out-healing the enemy. Of all the basic character classes, this is the one usually labeled with Don't Leave Home Without It.

The Nuker - tiny hit points, MASSIVE amounts of magical damage. Things tend to go BOOM, often in a large radius, when one's around. The usual drawbacks: need Tanks, need Healers, need to be protected during long cast times, need casting materials which can be expensive. A new advantage given to them is to have maybe one or two quick-casting, relatively inexpensive, spammable offensive spells.

The Damage Per Seconder (DPS) - hit hard, hit fast, and hit a LOT. Usually NOT magical; he either needs a lot of ammo or gets to sneak around.

The Mezzer - essentially the master of the status. Mezzers do not only know a bunch of helpful statuses and buffs, but also carry around a whole ton of harmful statuses and debuffs as his main offensive arsenal.

The Petmaster - he or she who must be obeyed, literally, by their minions. The minions often take on the basic character classes: some can take damage, some can dish out offense. The equivalent exchange is that Petmaster summons, Pets obey; Petmaster protects Pets, Pets protect Petmaster.

The Trapper - the one with all the tools at his/her disposal to make traps, which hit enemies with nasty effects such as nuking damage or debuffs; and devices, which often assist the party. The difference with the Petmaster, of course, is that the Petmaster summons living things; the Trapper constructs non-living things.

The Jack - as in "jack of all trades, master of none", a basic character class that has limited access to all of the other character classes' abilities. The important word, of course, is "limited". Tends to fill in the gaps in a party, or temporarily subs for any one of the others that goes down.

***

Scroll down that page a bit and you'll find that someone who plays Granado Espada has done a very, very basic outline of correspondence between the game's character classes and the archetypes done above. The important word being "basic". I'm going to try and do it in a little more depth here.

FIGHTER - Primarily Tank, of course, and this is mostly because of his/her Provoke ability and good Constitution. Depending on his/her stances, can also function as a DPSer.

SCOUT - Primarily a Healer, duh; which also can make him/her an effective secondary Tank. A Trapper and a Mezzer to some extent. Shares Mezzer duties with the Wizard.

WIZARD - Primarily Nuker, with all those good AoE magical effects. Additional stances make them Mezzers. The Levitation stance qualifies them for DPSer.

ELEMENTALIST - Primarily Nuker, to a far greater extent than Wizards. Because they are the only character class that can bestow elemental buffs, they also have a sub-specialty of Mezzer.

MUSKETEER - DPSer all the way. The Musk might be the only single-minded class in the game; everyone else has limited access to other abilities.

Catherine the Summoner, Viki, and to a limited extent the upcoming RNPC Claire serve as Petmasters, since they can summon marionettes, golems, and a honkin' big Bearwalker, respectively.

The Scout serves mostly as a trap-using Trapper. In GE, device-using Trappers are called, of course, Builders, so bring on Jack, Diego, and Angie.

The five martial artists can serve as Jacks: each has elements of Tank, DPSer, and Mezzer.

I'm not that knowledgeable with all of the game's many RNPCs so I want to ask for your help at this point: please identify each of the remaining RNPCs by how they fit into the archetypes! Since many of them are hybrids, please point out the top three or so primary types, and maybe one of their secondary types. The goal here is to establish a sort of reference for all the characters.

Thanks in advance for your help ^^

2 comments:

Manny said...

I bet the Catherines of INT, STR and DEX qualify as jacks. Even if they have almost all the stances, each version tends to have a specific specialty depedning on the highest stats.

Another Tanker would be the Coimbra Trooper, because he has 7 HP to start with and he's got Provoke!

Don't forget Grace and Brunie are DPSers as well (with Grace being the preferred one)! For a Melee DPSer, that's gotta be Lisa Lynway!

Trappers? How about Jack, Diego and Angie? They build stuff and plant traps too!

Rio can be a mix of a Nuker (for his Lightning Spells) and Mezzer (for his Serenade stance).

Emilia, Soho and little Viki can also be healers as well. Viki can be either Healer or Petmaster.

That's all I can think of right now! :D

PJ Punla said...

@ Manny

re the other Caths: agreed.

Trooper has Provoke? I didn't know that. okay, he's a tank.

I've already mentioned the Builders/Engineers in the article as Device-Trappers.

re Rio: that makes sense.

re Emilia and Soho: you need to qualify this some more - are you talking about the standard versions or the cash shop ones?

re Viki: agreed.