Is the Fighter/Wizard/Cleric/Rogue archetype by far the most iconic party archetype...

Is the Fighter/Wizard/Cleric/Rogue archetype by far the most iconic party archetype, or can it be argued that other classes such as the ranger or the paladin are equally iconic?

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I feel like Paladins and Bards have maybe secured themselves a similar position

Fighter / Rogue / Magic User
everything else is derivative

Fighter, Cleric and Magic-User are the oldest classes. Thief, Paladin and Ranger came shortly after.

In its most possibly distilled format:
Fighter for tanking.
Magic-Users for DPS and crowd control.
Clerics for support.

Bard is also pretty iconic.

>Playing a game of 5e
>Our fighter is fucking decrepit
>I mean, ancient
>He's an octogenarian human named "THAC0," armed with a magic sword and a rusty armor
>We have him, a Criminal background monk, a sorcerer with that goofy Favored Soul subclass, and a bard
>Keeps complaining that we don't have the right lineup but keeps referring to them as the straight roles of Thief, Cleric, and Wizard
>Has been beaten unconscious more times than I can count in less than five sessions
>Keeps on keeping on because of that fucking Brute subclass that was introduced in that Unearthed Arcana

To be honest, I've started wishing I'd rolled wizard instead of bard for a little while now. The player just makes me sound so goddamned awesome when he talks about my character's non-existent studious nature and attention to detail, which really just comes from faux bardic knowledge.

Maybe a classic adventuring party is better. Maybe a blast from the past is really what my table needs.

Is almost correct.
Is most correct.

For D&D Thief only came into existence after the war gaming trio started to break into dungeons and skills became a thing. Then in the mindset of a wargamer they just made a class around one aspect of the game because that is what you do in wargames, you make things as unique as possible and we've been stuck with someone who disarms traps and has hackneyed sneak attack things ever since.

Paladin is pretty much the DM making a character class for a friend case and I'm not sure how ranger came to be but I think it was a fighters kit originally.

For video games though the archetypes are more the MMO types of DPS, Tank, Healing, and Buffing. Whatever flavor of negations that go on in the physical/Magical variety don't matter.

Cinema everyone is whatever the plot dictates at that moment no matter the look they have. The only real thing there is the magic and mundane divide but both are just going to slaughter stuff and if they can pick a lock or not depends on if the writer wants them to be humbled, add tension, or expiated the scene.

The order was "Fighting Man and Magic-User", then "Cleric", then "Paladin", then "Thief", then "Ranger", then "Monk and Assassin", then "Bard", then "Druid"

Cleric was added for a friend. Paladin was meant to be Holger Carlsen. Ranger was added in the Strategic Review 'zine.

Fighting Man deals damage.
Magic-User covers retreats.
Cleric stretches resources.

Yeah faggoty snowflake classes really shit up the atmosphere of the game. No one wants to slay dragons with a monk who punches things to death and flies around like a dbz character

"That's anime" the wizard said smugly while flying on his magical broom with his cat familiar as he made people like him with magic and threw pure energy at his enemies.

D&D is anime now anyways. That's why my next character is going to be a wizard who announces all his spells like he's on Yu-Gi-Oh

it helps I can do a spot on impression of YGOA Kaiba

Is that the only one you can do?

I can't do original voices. It's all mimicry for me. I feel the curse of the Kenku more strongly than anyone at my table, and it sucks harder than you can possibly imagine.

Kaiba is my best, several people have told me it's basically identical.

I've got a good Pegasus going but that voice is easy mode. My Bakura is good too but it switches to Kaiba too easily so I avoid it.

I can do a decent Mokuba and Tristan, and an okay Pharoh. My voice doesn't get high enough for Tea. I have the right timbre for Joey but I can't do the Brooklyn accent.

Brooklyn accents are easy. It's a relaxed Cockney. Push your lips out with every goddamned sound you make and you've basically got it.

Also, a couple of years ago, I played Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. One of the chapters was focused on Palom, the super-talented black mage whose twin was a super-talented white mage. His entire chapter was about training a white mage in the arts of black magic, and he couldn't really effectively teach her because he didn't know the real mechanics of his magic, because his talent was so goddamned stellar that he didn't really know how to explain it.

I only just now realized that struggle, trying to explain how I mimic, like second nature, the sounds I hear. This has been enlightening.

God I hate Sneak Attack as a class feature

>Wizard
>Fighter
>Fighter
>Ranger
>Ranger
>Commoner
>Commoner
>Commoner
>Commoner
Better

I don't know why but now I really want to make a system with a resource called "Peasant". Your character has a certain number of peasants and can spend them for various effects. A rouge could spend a peasant to ignore damage from failing to disarm a trap, or a fighter could use a peasant to guarantee an attack hit. Naturally this would be fluffed by the rogue using the peasant as a shield and the fighter throwing the peasant onto the enemy's weapon as a distraction.

Can you give us something on vocaroo plz?

This is shit though.

Much better:
>Fighter to handle combats
>Rogue to do stealth, infiltrate, jailbreak, assassinations, dungeon exploration utility, and be decent at combat with elusiveness and sneak attacks
>Ranger to handle wilderness encounters, forage for food and magical herbs/reagents, provide shelter in the wilderness, and be decent at combat, sniping and/or stealth
>Magic user to offer resource-intensive combat support and unique off-combat utility
>Bard to provide social utility, lore, in-combat morale bonuses and distraction tricks, and to make sure songs will be sung of the great deeds of the party

The wizard throws peasants covered in blue paint and screaming MAGIC MISSILE! at his enemies

What happens when that one peasant refuses to die and starts to scale on the party?

Regardles of name I use three threes
>The fireballs and lightning bolts mage
>The healer
>The hexer

>The tank
>The balanced fighter
>The glass assassin

>The urban survivalist
>The wilderness survivalist
>The non-magical autistic specialist

Having any one member of each triad in a three man party ensures a good game.

I think they call that Rouge Trader

A lot of these divisions seem bad, but this
>The urban survivalist
>The wilderness survivalist
is especially bad. One of those two is guaranteed to be irrelevant at any given time.

Rolled 6 (1d9)

Switch out Paladin with Bard, pallys are just discount clerics

>unless you work in a lot of small towns with lots of rivers and parks/trees in them.

That is unrelated to the stated point. Whatever DnD's original classes may be the most iconic party is still F/R/M. Cleric is just a particular flavor of M sometimes, but not always, mixed with F.

Rivers in a town are not wilderness, parks are NEVER wilderness.

So...which is Veeky Forums, and what boards are the other classes?

It's a terrible feature that all steams from the paradox that the fighter is in theory the only "competent" one in straight up non magic fighting but everyone needs to be able to fight cause its terrible to have 3/4ths of a party sit with their thumb up their ass unless they drop magic. Given that rogues can't have magic they needed some carrot to bait Rogues into combat but they really fucked up on it on all levels. Its situational and often disappears after first round of the fight, most high level shit is immune to it, and the dice it gives doesn't scale against anything with a positive CON bonus above 1.

>Fighter, Cleric and Magic-User are the oldest classes.
Actually, Cleric was added to counter the Vampire class.

>after the war gaming trio
Clerics weren't from CHAINMAIL.
>started to break into dungeon
Blackmoor wasn't all dungeons all the time for the first campaign, but it was from the second onward.
The game was about only dungeon crawling by the time Gygax heard about it and well before Clerics were added.

Some westcoast playgroup (the same group that later made Warlock) got into an argument over whether a dwarf could be expected to know how to pick locks.
They ended up houseruling thieves in as a variant magic-user. It worked the exact same as an MU mechanically, but with thief activities as spells.
(this was before TSR's ad hoc telephone tree had clarified all the rules for everybody, so the group let MUs spam memorized spells)
I could go fetch that spell list for you if you'd like, but would probably regret seeing it. It's pretty bad.

Anyways, "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures" says right in the back "phone us your cool houserules" so a player in the group rung up Gary and loosely described it to him.
Gary said, "That's pretty cool." and stuck something similar into the supplement of optional rules he was writing. His thieves were unplaytested (and a bit of a mess) when it was released.

Clerics were added before D&D was released. If you feel like splitting hairs and going farther back, Arneson's first campaign had Rangers, Paladins, Assassins, Merchants, and Sages as options. And Vampires, come to think of it.

No, those four are the top-tier and paladin and ranger are on the next level down.

Although that's in western stuff, in Asian stuff it's fighter/melee, wizard, and ranger/archer with cleric/healer not quite reaching that higher tier, and rogues being nowhere near the same level.

They get upgraded to killable NPC, preferably with a noticeable facial scar and a world-weary grimace as they get flung into and dodge YET ANOTHER spear trap.

>D&D is anime now anyways
Have you tried not playing pathfinder?

>instead of all playing the same game, let's all take turns playing separate games!

>he doesn't want to go dungeon delving with Goku

Wizard sacrifices virgin peasant girls to unleash unspeakable powers.

This image is cute.

google.com/search?q=carcosa filetype:pdf

What's with these pauldrons?

Rogue was a mistake.

Ranger is the "How the fuck do these idiots survive going from city to city and spending days in the woods or on the road" incarnate, the rugged survivalist. Paladin is the knight in shining armour, the moral compass, the beacon of hope. I don't think they're done well in most systems but I'd say they're just as iconic.

That's giving wizards too much.
>Fighter for tanking
>Ranger for DPS
>Magic Users for crowd control
>Clerics for support.

A Paladin is just a more aggressive cleric. They fill almost identical niches. A Ranger is just a type of fighter.

And lycanthropes and wraiths right?

Of fucking course not.
He would eat the entire party's supplies right away then fuck off for half the campaign just to reappear at the end to steal the spotlight from everybody and fight the final boss by himself.
Motherfucker is like the ultimate That Guy.

>A Paladin is just a more aggressive cleric.
That's what he degraded into.
>A Ranger is just a type of fighter.
Only in combat.

>A Paladin is just a more aggressive cleric. They fill almost identical niches.

The correct answer to this problem is to delete the Cleric, which isn't a fucking thing in fantasy outside of DnD. We can have the Armored Paladin and Clothy Healbitch, we don't need their wacky missing link ancestor too.

D&D has been its own weird beast for almost its entire existence. Paring it down to "shit from existing fantasy" doesn't leave you with much.

>Paring it down to "shit from existing fantasy" doesn't leave you with much.

Eh, it'd leave you with plenty. You don't even technically have to get rid of the Cleric, just demote it to the wacky Warlord/Curate PrC combination it is.

The point is, clerics are clearly designed around the idea of being a morale-boosting religious leader special unit option for a wargame troop block, and letting them coast on inertia as the core divine hero instead of something based on Roland or Elijah is fucking bizarre.

>he doesn't like the classic skull-crushing battle Cleric
>he prefers its dumbed-down, less-flavorful counterparts

smdh

>less flavorful

read Song of Roland nigga

mah nigga