Many years ago, when I had a friend who was into the original Everquest, I remember him explaining the notion of “aggro” to me. The creature in the game would attack whomever had done the most damage to it. Seems simple – makes sense. Since then, I’ve heard the terms “mob”, “dps”, “instance” and “raid” bandied about often enough that I understand them. And I understand Aoe, buffing, and min-maxxing from my long years of playing Dungeons & Dragons. Nonetheless, I need to be honest: since I’m someone who assiduously avoids most online games, some of these terms elude me. Their increasing use in single-player games makes me a bit uncomfortable. And this type of gameplay can get stale very quickly.

I noticed this recently when reading some online FAQs while playing Final Fantasy XII. The walkthrough talked about kiting, about casting ‘bubble’ on your tanks, and about aggro. Sigh. I’m not arguing that the whole tank/dps/healer system isn’t effective – it obviously is designed to be the most efficient way to defeat monsters. But what I’d like to see is a game that’s designed to disallow or defeat what has become the dominant party configuration, simply because too much of the same thing gets old.

Recently, when reading PC World’s article 10 Reasons You Must Play Torchlight, I noticed the usage of the terms “tank”, “ranged DPS”, and “nuker”. That’s what made me start thinking about this whole thing. Sure, I’m MMO-phobic. I’ll admit that. But that’s not the only reason I’m squeamish about these terms. When games force you to abide by these mechanics, it removes your ability to be creative. Even Borderlands has a tank (Brick) and a healer. (Roland) The other characters, I suppose, could fall into the DPS role.

Compare this to the somewhat older set of RPG roles: fighter, magic-user, cleric, thief. While there are certainly some analogies between these, (fighter=tank, cleric=healer) they really are different. A magic-user and fighter are both very good at dealing out damage, and a cleric can often do close to as much. But the fighter can take more hits. The magic-user and thief, while they can’t do high damage as consistently as a fighter, can generally do higher damage in the right situations: spells are generally limited, and backstabbing can be tricky to accomplish.

I’m not sure that I’m trying to make a point with this analysis, I’m primarily sharing a stream of consciousness. Perhaps tank/dps/healer is just the new fighter/magic-user/cleric/thief. Maybe in another decade the system will be revamped again and we’ll see caller/swarmer/pillar or maybe fetishist/raconteur/ninja/pirate/jai alai player.