Isn't the trinity a fancy way of saying there are roles in the R in RPG? So...in any case, there's a trinity in every MMORPG, it's just that some games have Tank, DPS, Healer but some games expand on that by having Tank, DPS, Healer, Crowd Control, Buffer, Debuffer, etc.....
Not really no. At least, it wasn't that way in any of the games I played. Your role was something like "fanatical priest of the war god with a penchant for cheap booze" or "unemployed pit fighter looking for the dwarf who killed his wife." The mechanics were there to facilitate the role-play, not to define the roles themselves.
Some MMOs in the past had 2 roles: DPS and healers.
Basically the more damage you made the fewer HPs or armorclass did you have. It is actually more complicated than that since the third class most of those games had were the thief which were a must in any dungeon for many years and still are in many P&P games.
And yes, when you did old dungeons the order you walked in were important, you put the mages last since it was harder for the enemies to reach them then which mean there were some body blocking. On the other hand did the thief always walk in front since traps were usually the main threat to the group besides the endboss.
The MMO trinity was invented in the modern form in the game "Meridian 59". Pen and paper had nothing close to that before. You never had a character that would take all attacks from the monsters while the healer keeps her alive before, unless you played with only 3 players in your group and only had one warrior/pally or other tough melee class.
The first MMOs were very close to boardgames like Descentand mostly about moving figures on the floorplans in a dungeon (we are talking "Chainmail here, the game Gygax invented that eventually got upgraded to D&D) but thye never really had a trinity mechanic anyways.
As a GM you usually let the monsters do the smart thing and target the wizard first followed by the cleric or the theif depending on the situation, the tougher characters will try to keep them alive by bodyblocking and tactics. And of course when someone have little HP left they are the main target.
Many other MMOs doesnt even have healers and some doesnt even have classes. Heck, some like Amber doesnt even use dices or cards either.
In short: The MMO trinity is a typical MMO thing but there were primitive systems (and in some cases rather advanced but very different) before it in P&P. P&P combat have always been a lot more focused on strategy than MMOs though and things like positioning and timing are more important there.
Been playing P&P since 1984 and MMOs since 1996, there are people here who played longer than me but I have a feeling they agree with me here.
Both MMOs and P&P RPGs are fun though, but they are different. And no, MMOs dont need the trinity combat, it was the first idea a small company thought of for the first real MMO and just assuming that it is the perfect system seems a bit weird to me. I would love if someone made a good porting of other P&P systems like Shadowrun, Runequest or ARS magica instead with the P&P system straight off. The bad part is that you dont fight so much in P&P as in MMOs so P&P systems are often a lot more deadlier.
There was absolutely role specializing before DnD and the trinity came from MMOS because groups could be comprised of every combination of classes but it was recomended to have certain roles covered.
I would also argue that the trinity should of been 4 roles with CC being the 4th but generally this was given to every role in some amount.
What is actually interesting to me is how roles have evolved because of the trinity. In the older days you could think of healing/DPS/tanking as quantities you do well with a certain amount of points divided between them. Does a healer do more or less damage now in comparison to a dps role? What about a tank?
Reading a bit further on, I find that the "trinity discussion" has become the "aggro discussion."
I guess, in effect, since no aggro management was used by your DM in D&D games, there was no tanking in your experience. Not every DM used a random roll to see who the mob would hit. Why did fighters wear the best armor they could get? Why did fighters get the higher hit dice per level? After all, isn't a human a human and a half-orc a half-orc? Why the variance depending upon the career one chooses? Those game mechanics tell me it was so they could take the brunt of the attacks. Unlike tanks in MMOs, they also could deal a lot of damage, which also sometimes factored into the monsters choice of target. I realize what you are arguing is the actual management of aggro. In my experience, we had some control over who the monster would hit because of our DM. It was not always a random dice roll to decide who they monsters would attack. I admit that EQ had an actual "taunt" skill, and thus aggro management became the norm and was probably the reason for term "the trinity" to be born, but that does not mean it did not exist beforehand.
I recall a battle my little group engaged in against a female troll and her young offspring. Our Fighter attacked the youngster and handily managed the momma troll's aggro. I laugh with the memory of the encounter because my DM was sick of us always asking, "What was the loot?" He said her "treasure" was an old dirty rag and an old gnawed on bone. "It was a treasure to her!" he informed us
As far as DPS goes, D&D combat was based on 6 second rounds. You could hit three times and miss 7 times in a turn (1 minute segment) of battle or hit all 10 times in the same turn. You could add up all the highly variable damage done by a player, divide it by the length of the battle and come up with their DPS. It really did not matter, though. The mechanic was there but rather pointless. Kind of like how it is in MMOs, wouldn't you say?
AIDS was not "discovered" before the late 19th, early 20th century. Does that mean it did not exist before then? Who knows? Maybe, long ago, deaths credited to the flu or a simple cold or chicken pox was actually AIDS and nobody labeled it as such. After all, AIDS attacks one's immune system and thus makes them susceptible to more common diseases. We will never know how long AIDS has been around. Does that mean that "the trinity" did not exist before it was coined for MMOs?
As I said previously, it really depends upon on how someone played D&D. A game mechanic DM would randomly roll for every action taken by a NPC. A roleplaying DM would react to the player's actions.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
There was never the degree of overspecialization in P&P games that you see in MMOs. Yes, a cleric could heal, but he could also take a punch pretty well. Fighters were durable, but they contributed a lot of damage; at lower levels, they did most of the damage really. With a balanced party -- which almost never happened in practice -- you didn't see any class totally marginalized into performing a single task. Even the wizard, the closest thing old-school D&D had to a pure damage class, could serve as a de facto tank with the right spells. It's easy to look back on the tactics players used and superimpose the current paradigm, but in reality combat was never as mechanical as it is in your garden-variety MMO.
Most importantly, there was never any game that had rules to determine which character enemies would attack (excluding 4th ed. D&D, which was an attempt to replicate MMO gameplay). And even if there had been, I suspect that most DMs would have ignored it.
Edit: To clarify, yes, you usually had the burly characters up front. But that is not what defines the trinity, or even a tank, in the current sense. When the "tank" does as much damage as the "DPS," the distinction between the two is meaningless. Mages, rangers and rogues had other tricks up their sleeves and were not defined only by the amount of damage they did. On the same note, you never had "healers" simply hang back and heal while everyone else did the fighting.
In short: The MMO trinity is a typical MMO thing but there were primitive systems (and in some cases rather advanced but very different) before it in P&P. P&P combat have always been a lot more focused on strategy than MMOs though and things like positioning and timing are more important there.
Yes, I agree with a lot of the posts in this tread, and with this paragraph in particular. Groups of players had to think and try to take advantage of the whole context of each encounter.
Of course, the fighter would try to bait or bodyblock ennemies from coming too close to the casters. But that was just one of the tactics used, and its efficiency was depending entirely upon the goodwill of the game master. This baiting/bodyblocking of opponents was just one way of trying to use the strategy: "divide and conquer". We could also use spells that temporarily removed opponents from the actual fight (such as Sleep, Charm, Hold, Web etc). Or it could be spells that actually modified the combat scene, blocking a door or dividing a room in two, such as Web, Wall of Stone, etc. Anything to lessen the pressure on the party.
Reading a bit further on, I find that the "trinity discussion" has become the "aggro discussion."
I guess, in effect, since no aggro management was used by your DM in D&D games, there was no tanking in your experience. Not every DM used a random roll to see who the mob would hit. Why did fighters wear the best armor they could get? Why did fighters get the higher hit dice per level? After all, isn't a human a human and a half-orc a half-orc? Why the variance depending upon the career one chooses? Those game mechanics tell me it was so they could take the brunt of the attacks. Unlike tanks in MMOs, they also could deal a lot of damage, which also sometimes factored into the monsters choice of target. I realize what you are arguing is the actual management of aggro. In my experience, we had some control over who the monster would hit because of our DM. It was not always a random dice roll to decide who they monsters would attack. I admit that EQ had an actual "taunt" skill, and thus aggro management became the norm and was probably the reason for term "the trinity" to be born, but that does not mean it did not exist beforehand.
I recall a battle my little group engaged in against a female troll and her young offspring. Our Fighter attacked the youngster and handily managed the momma troll's aggro. I laugh with the memory of the encounter because my DM was sick of us always asking, "What was the loot?" He said her "treasure" was an old dirty rag and an old gnawed on bone. "It was a treasure to her!" he informed us
As far as DPS goes, D&D combat was based on 6 second rounds. You could hit three times and miss 7 times in a turn (1 minute segment) of battle or hit all 10 times in the same turn. You could add up all the highly variable damage done by a player, divide it by the length of the battle and come up with their DPS. It really did not matter, though. The mechanic was there but rather pointless. Kind of like how it is in MMOs, wouldn't you say?
AIDS was not "discovered" before the late 19th, early 20th century. Does that mean it did not exist before then? Who knows? Maybe, long ago, deaths credited to the flu or a simple cold or chicken pox was actually AIDS and nobody labeled it as such. After all, AIDS attacks one's immune system and thus makes them susceptible to more common diseases. We will never know how long AIDS has been around. Does that mean that "the trinity" did not exist before it was coined for MMOs?
As I said previously, it really depends upon on how someone played D&D. A game mechanic DM would randomly roll for every action taken by a NPC. A roleplaying DM would react to the player's actions.
I agree with this. But if it all depends on how you play....meaning there is not a specific mechanic in the game rules, I would argue then it did not exist within the game.
I also don't think the AIDS example is a good analogy. AIDS is a medical term to apply to an illness. The illness was not intentionally created to bring definition to the term. The trinity, however, was actually manufactured by game designers.
I see what you and the OP are saying.The roles existed but it's aggro management that makes those roles into the Holy Trinity.I just don't totally agree,I think we've always tried to keep NPC attention from weaker members and healers by having those with more armor and health take damage in games where teamwork to overcome the environment is the goal.Hell I even did it with singlepalyer CRPGs where you controlled a team of adventurers.SO I've always thoguht int erms of damage soakers,dps and support whne playing RPGs.
What were the CRPGs you played a party of adventurers and there was taunt and aggro management? I'm not saying none exist, rather asking which ones had that. Most used party order, where you put the weaker ones in the back. And, again, defense/offense/support is the basic set of roles in team based conflict or competition. That is not the trinity as it exists in MMOs.
Think of your average CRPG. If someone suggested creating a character that couldn't really do damage but just took damage well, wouldn't you be confused as to why they were asking you to create half a character? What if they suggested that you put the thief in the front lines? You'd probably ask them why they thought it would be a good idea to put a 4-6 hp char in front of the fighters, priests and other characters with 8-16, right? Wouldn't you also find it rather odd to create your perfect party and then find out that the fighter has a Taunt button that he presses and everything attacks him, completely ignoring everything else that is doing damage to them? That would seem rather ridiculous.
Taunt and aggro management aren't really an MMO thing or even a class-based MMO thing. It is a band-aid over the basic combat system that became broken once collision (party order served that purpose in CRPGs) was removed and restrictive classes were made.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Because D&D had "general guidelines", giving the DM a lot of control over their games, it depends on how one played the game.
In my group (pre-computer games - circa 1979), our fighters would "roleplay" and taunt bad guys into attacking them by actually voicing their taunts, if they had a common language between them. Usually, depending on the taunt, our DM may add some extra percentage for the bad guy to hit the taunter.
If anyone hit with a particularly nasty hit, he would get bonuses for attracting the bad guys next attack.
Then again positioning factored into the fight a lot more than any MMORPG I have played. Tough to hit that wizard who keeps well out of range.
Our cleric always asked the fighter how many HP he had left, waiting for the right time to heal them.
True, "DPS" was not a role, but "damage dealing" was. Yes, everyone could deal damage, but some classes were much better at it than others.
When we rolled up new parties, we would ask amongst ourselves if we had a fighter and a cleric to insure those roles were covered.
[an aside] ahhh... the original Bard class. One of my friends and I took that road. Gaining 7 levels as a fighter (to get that extra attack per round) then going through 9 levels as a Thief (to max out the thieving skills) before finally getting to be a Bard was a great experience for me. I think I retired as a level 17 Bard... Those were great times
[EDIT]
Originally posted by grimal The trinity, I think, refers to that special Tank/Healer/DPS formation and the focus of aggro grabbing through taunting mechanisms.
The EQ trinity consisted of Warrior/Cleric/Enchanter. Note, these are not roles, but rather classes. Every group ever formed sought these classes out for the groups.
I remember taunts as well. Taunt came from D&D if I'm not mistaken, as far as games are concerned.
It looks like there's been a passing reference to the origin of the trinity in mmo's but I don't think I saw anyone go into the actual history of what happened.
The trinity was one of several mmo terms that began in Everquest. Class balance had been poor at release and SOE took a wrecking ball to the whole thing with the release of the Kunark expansion. I have never seen an in-game community turn on its own as fast or as viciously as what happened in the two months after Kunark was released ( hybrids ... those poor bastards). Part of the fallout of the balance mess SOE had made of the game was that three classes were now considered indispensable for every high level group - warrior, cleric, and enchanter with just three spaces left over for everybody else.
The definition of trinity in mmo's have slightly changed over the years since then going from W/C/E (and I guess we will deign to allow a few of you plebians to tag along with us) of Everquest to the modern Tank/Healer/Dps.
Not so fun fact: This was the game that also gave birth the the infamous "working as intended".
It looks like there's been a passing reference to the origin of the trinity in mmo's but I don't think I saw anyone go into the actual history of what happened.
The trinity was one of several mmo terms that began in Everquest. Class balance had been poor at release and SOE took a wrecking ball to the whole thing with the release of the Kunark expansion. I have never seen an in-game community turn on its own as fast or as viciously as what happened in the two months after Kunark was released ( hybrids ... those poor bastards). Part of the fallout of the balance mess SOE had made of the game was that three classes were now considered indispensable for every high level group - warrior, cleric, and enchanter with just three spaces left over for everybody else.
The definition of trinity in mmo's have slightly changed over the years since then going from W/C/E (and I guess we will deign to allow a few of you plebians to tag along with us) of Everquest to the modern Tank/Healer/Dps.
Not so fun fact: This was the game that also gave birth the the infamous "working as intended".
So it actually was born from EQ? That was my original assumption as well but I didn't know the specifics of what you pointed out. Anyone else remember this?
Because D&D had "general guidelines", giving the DM a lot of control over their games, it depends on how one played the game.
In my group (pre-computer games - circa 1979), our fighters would "roleplay" and taunt bad guys into attacking them by actually voicing their taunts, if they had a common language between them. Usually, depending on the taunt, our DM may add some extra percentage for the bad guy to hit the taunter.
If anyone hit with a particularly nasty hit, he would get bonuses for attracting the bad guys next attack.
Then again positioning factored into the fight a lot more than any MMORPG I have played. Tough to hit that wizard who keeps well out of range.
Our cleric always asked the fighter how many HP he had left, waiting for the right time to heal them.
True, "DPS" was not a role, but "damage dealing" was. Yes, everyone could deal damage, but some classes were much better at it than others.
When we rolled up new parties, we would ask amongst ourselves if we had a fighter and a cleric to insure those roles were covered.
[an aside] ahhh... the original Bard class. One of my friends and I took that road. Gaining 7 levels as a fighter (to get that extra attack per round) then going through 9 levels as a Thief (to max out the thieving skills) before finally getting to be a Bard was a great experience for me. I think I retired as a level 17 Bard... Those were great times
[EDIT]
Originally posted by grimal The trinity, I think, refers to that special Tank/Healer/DPS formation and the focus of aggro grabbing through taunting mechanisms.
The EQ trinity consisted of Warrior/Cleric/Enchanter. Note, these are not roles, but rather classes. Every group ever formed sought these classes out for the groups.
I remember taunts as well. Taunt came from D&D if I'm not mistaken, as far as games are concerned.
Well, it must have predated (and discarded) the 1st ed AD&D and after because I don't ever recall fighters using taunt to force monsters to attack them. Monsters were forced to fight the fighters because they couldn't get past them. Tactical positioning was very important in D&D, even in the gold box and NWN games. And even then it wasn't foolproof. Ranged attackers would still target the magic users because they could cast or shoot past the fighters.
Since this side-discussion seemed to be derailing a thread, I thought I'd create a new one specifically for this.
So, the Trinity.
Did this start with MMOs or was it created back with pen n paper Dungeons n Dragons some twenty plus years ago?
The trinity, as I understand it, is the tank/dps/healer combination used in most modern MMORPGS.
For the Trinity to exist, there needs to exist game mechanics of "Aggro" and "Taunt". These, as far as I know, never existed as game mechanics in old pen n paper Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks. So even though you may have used tactics similar, it was not in fact the Trinity.
1. Unclear only to those that were not able to get their heads out of the tiny little box it was placed in by MMO companies unable to think differently. The holy trinity was one of the worst ideas in RPG history, thank you D&D."
Grimal:
"What??? DnD? The trinity was created by the modern MMO. There was no trinity in DnD."
JTCGS:
"Are you freaking serious....The first MMORPG with Graphics was NeverWinter Nights Online back in 1991, it had the holy trinity which Meridian 59 used in 1996 and EverQuest which is D&D with another name...wowzers.
Original D&D Black Box had 3 classes. Cleric (Healer), Fighter (tank), Mage(DPS).
It wasnt until Greyhawk was released that other classes started
to appear, Greyhawk brought the Theif (another DPS) and the Paladin (tank/healer). it wasnt until the player handbook came out that the first non-trinity class was created...the BARD.
Everything else all falls into the trinity catagory BECAUSE they are taken from D&D.
/fighter/berserker/avenger/barbarian = dps
paladin = tank/healer
warrior/warlord/ardent = tank/dps
Warden/batlemaid/swordmage = tank
ranger/scout = dps
theif/rogue = dps
wizard/mage/elementalist/necro/warlock = dps
cleric/priest = healer
Druid/shaman/monk = healer/dps"
Grimal:
"Wow. Ok, first off, DPS stands for damage per second. Combat in DnD was never based on real time. There were turns or rounds, so how could it have been Damage Per Second? It couldn't have been!
The Trinity was developed back with the first gen of MMOs (EQ 1). Made up of the Tank, Healer and DPS. DnD never had such a term for this combat style because it didn't come into play until the MMO!!
True each class was based off an archetype, healer, warrior, etc, but the actual term trinity as we use it now was coined by and for the MMO genre.
Please, show me anywhere in any of the pre-MMO genre DnD books where it specifically states the trinity. You'd be hard pressed.
The only trinity you will possibly find mentioned is that of the three core books: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and the Monster Manual...but those referred to the three books, not the Tank/DPS/Healer trinity you are talking about.
Second, EQ 1 may be a fantasy based online RPG but it is not Dungeons and Dragons.
I can't believe I am actually needing to post this. Did you even play Dungeons and Dragons PNP?"
Vorthanion:
"No, tabletop definitely had the trinity. Wizards / Sorcerors were the damage classes. Fighters / Paladins / Rangers were the meat shields and protectors of the mages, always putting themselves between the opponent and the mage. Clerics / Druids were the hybrids who both kicked ass and saved the group's bacon with well placed heals. Thieves were the melee damage class and trap experts. I never played a campaign that didn't have at least three of the above archetypes as campaigns couldn't be completed without them.
They may not have been labeled as the trinity at the time, but that is exactly what they were. Doesn't matter if combat is real time, turn based or some mix of the two, the point is that you had to have classes that healed, classes that tanked and protected and classes that dealt real damage in order to be successful in campaigns."
Grimal:
"I won't argue that you could play it like that now if you wanted but the trinity refers to the mechanic in MMOs. Again, please show me where it is specifically referred to as "Tank/DPS/Healer" trinity in those books. You can't because the label was created for MMOs. There was no taunt mechanism, either.
Edit: By saying the trinity existed with old pen n paper RPGs of the 70s-80s, you are projecting a 1999 mechanic onto something that predates the very definition of it. If Everquest and the modern MMO never existed, there would be no "trinity" as we know it. You can't go back and attribute it to something that was around 30 or more years before it. You can argue there were elements or roles that beared resemblance to it, and perhaps lent itself to the creation of it some time after but thats about as far as you can go."
Dopple MO:
"This. Trinity as people refer it nowadays is basically: Tank manages aggro, DPS deal damage, Healer keeps everyone alive. I have never seen characters systematically doing aggro management in the pen and paper games I played, because that notion was pretty much non existent."
Volkon:
"Have to agree with Grimal on this one. Never once while playing D&D (I was in the Navy... not a lot to do at night when on a carrier at sea...) did anyone take roles like that. No one ever taunted the boss, no one was a pure healer, etc. It was actually a lot closer to GW2 than WoW."
JTCGS:
"Did you NOT see where I said there was a NeverWinter Night Online MMORPG made back in 1991? Or that it was followed by Meridian 59? Or how about right after that I mentioned EQ being based off them.
D&D gold box games had SPELLS WITH LINGERING EFFECTS AND BLEEDS from melee attacks which would TICK each round of combat, This is where the idea of DAMAGE PER SECOND comes from...YEAH, Meridian 59 had real time combat and thus had DPS before EQ.
The very idea that you are now pretending EQ is not a D&D clone is crazy, the arugment has no meaning other than to argue."
Vorthanion:
"MMOs and their developers don't label their classes as the trinity either, players do. Of course there was taunting in D&D. Not only did my fighters shout epithets at mobs to keep their attention, I also would place myself between them and the physically weaker members of the party which in itself is taunting, forcing the mob to face me and ignore my party. I'm not projecting anything. The mechanic already existed, it's just that no one even gave it a second thought or considered it a bad thing."
Grimal:
"Nice try."
Vorthanion:
"Any more than your pathetic effort."
Grimal:
"The burden of proof resides on you. Your example above just shows a description of a combat encounter. Just because it bears similarity does not mean that the trinity suddenly exists. That's like saying that all green items are equal just because they are green."
Vorthanion:
"Just because you are too blind to see it for what it was or too obstinate to admit you were wrong. Your argument is no different thaI' ve already shot down your whole argument. Others have agreed. If you can't talk nice, avoid discussions."n people who proclaim that homosexuality is a modern issue, all based on the fact that even though it existed in our ancient past, it wasn't labeled as such and therefore it didn't technically exist. The terminology and label may be modern, the idea and practice are not.
By the way, Ms. Knowitall, the burden of proof is required on both sides of an argument and you haven't proven anything yourself."
Grimal:
"I' ve already shot down your whole argument. Others have agreed. If you can't talk nice, avoid discussions."
Vorthanion:
"You haven't shot down anything and one or two agreements doesn't mean anything. You were never nice to begin with, so don't try pretending otherwise. Your post history is replete with sarcasm and baiting. It's I who should have known better than to argue with someone like you."
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
Well, the roles did technically exist in DnD but they did not resemble anything we see today. You had a tank, but he had a myraid of things he could do. Besides being an insane damage dealer, the warrior could do a number of other things too. You could specialise them to be great at spotting traps, or making potions, or whatever. Feats defined a class as much as class skills did.
Hell a caster wasn't even a real damage dealer early on anyway. They were pure utility until nearly 12-15 when they had the spells and feats to support serious throwdown. Before that a warrior was easily better for killing things. He didn't have to sleep a day after each fight either. Clerics were basically tanks as we know them now. Nigh unkillable, heavy plate wearing, smash your face kinda guys....that also happened to turn the undead and heal you. I imagine most fighter types leaned toward barbarians anyway, simply because they could rage while supreme cleaving their way through 50 enemies in a row. Thieves and Assasins were neat, but my favorite incarnation was the shadow dancer. Getting that positional backstab was a ton easier when you could walk into the trees shadow and OUT of his.
I'm rambling, and I'm sorry. The point is that DnD had a trinity. But it cared more for being awesome than adhering to that trinity...so class role was more or less defined by the player. Nothing prevented you from having a druid tank while his feral bear pet and two treants bashed things in. They even gave you a druid spell that specifically turned metal armors into wood and another that allowed the wood to retain a high armor class. A wizard could wear plate, suck down some mage armor and punch faces. Or he could stop time and cast 4 rounds worth of spells at once. Whatever. A cleric could really focus on stats that allowed him to cast more heals...or he could bloody str con it out like a warrior and beat things up and heal himself when things got rough.
That was the fun part. Each character in DnD was varied BEFORE you even considered multiclassing. Now a game has to include multiclassing just to barely touch the surface of the character depth DnD had for its core class.
Building a group as a trinity was just a strategy adopted by the players to clear content faster. These were the power gamer types that existed even in the 70s and 80s. In DnD a lot of this depended on the GM if it was to be allowed.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle was a major factor in bringing the trinity to the forefront in gaming. In WFB the use of 3d minitures on a battlefield allowed defensive melee units to block the path of oposing melee units from taking out the magic and ranged units on the back lines. This is the earliest use of the term "tanking." Many of the tactics in WFB were copied from historical battle movements. Blame Ramseys of Egypt or Alexander the great for devising ancient battle strategy of stacking archers safely behind their melee units. The use of reserve troops could also be seen as a "healing" mechanic. As melee units were wounded or killed on the front lines the commander would bring in fresh troops from the back lines to relieve the wounded. Keeping a reserve is superior strategy than having everyone charge at once. Sure the Phonecians and Melachites didn't think the trinity was fair but who cares about them? They were conquered.
Bottom line here is the trinity is rooted in historical tactical battle strategy.
The term Trinity changed from EQ1 to WoW, it originally was Healer/Tank/Slower (or Healer/Tank/CC, depending on the circumstance), because DPS was just "everyone else" used to fill out a group, and the only people I know of that called themselves "DPS" were rangers who were desperate to get in a group (when they weren't busy trying to convince you that they were really the tank).
It's also the oldest post I could find where the group class makeup was referred to as "Trinity". (although I didn't look terribly exhaustively)
Really, if you want to get down to it, it just refers to a way that people commonly build their group - form the group around XXX group roles (with whatever class or play style can fulfill that), and your group will have a good chance of succeeding. In EQ, a group with a healer/tank/slower (or healer/tank/cc) had a good chance of taking on pretty well all group content. In WoW, a group with a healer/tank/dps has a good chance of taking on pretty well all group content.
It doesn't really have to do with the taunt mechanic - it just so happened that there were 3 roles that, if actively defined and filled, happened to make the content easier (probably because most of the content was designed around those 3 roles).
By no means was that the only way to get through content. I can remember one infamous group of mages on my old EQ1 server that loved to go around, and they would 1-group older raid content with their pets. No tanks, no slowers, no healers - completely defying the "Trinity" concept. Groups in EQ1 commonly were unorthodox - especially when the server populations started to decline in the mid-00's.
Nothing special about the term trinity really - it's just that so much content across so many games have been designed with that in mind that most people can't wrap their heads around anything else.
Personally, I loved the older EQ1 stuff, where the trinity wasn't so well-defined. Classes were very diverse, and roles weren't cookie-cutter and had to share common cross-class abilities. I also really love the newer games, where the trinity goes out the window - it makes life more chaotic, and I find it fun when it doesn't just break down to zergitmoar and can keep some semblance of tactics involved in the game play.
DnD still had classes, and roles, but it wasn't necessarily a trinity. You had a live person who was DMing who could fill the role of "Artificial Intelligence" a whole lot better than any computer program can do, and can work around mechanics that go beyond just the pen-and-paper rules, so roles could be a whole lot more diverse, players can be a whole lot more creative, and the DM could compensate or tailor the encounter around their players. In a game, if you come across a locked chest and don't have a rogue - well, you just keep on walking. In a Pen-n-Paper game, maybe someone hacks the box open, or you decide to pick it up and carry it back to town, or maybe you fireball it and melt the lock off - or any number of infinite possibilities that players could come up with when they aren't constrained within the limits of an artificial game engine.
I've been playing table-top RPGs since I could hold a pencil, and I don't think any of them had any notion of an aggro mechanic. We had THAC0 and alignment languages, but never anything so stupid as the trinity.
In old-school CRPGS, it made sense to put your heavilly armored characters up front, but there was never any special mechanic that pigeon-holed characters like the current trinity does. As far as I know, all that originated with Everquest (I could be wrong -- I was playing UO back then, where everyone was a heavilly-armored mage and we bandaged our own damn selves).
yeah, agro (and by extension, trinity) was never mechanically enforced. The GM just sort of knew that the hulking warrior could take on more guys than the dude in a bath robe. It wasn't fun when people died, and it's not like the table top stuff was players vs GM or anything.
Before WoW the 'trinity' actually was a quartet that included a crowd control class of some kind. A tank would NOT survive engaging multiple mobs at once and a CC class was essential in ensuring only one target was ever actively engaged in the battle. EQ1 and EQ2 (in the early days at least) both had this, but WoW did away with it and no MMO since has allowed CC to be that useful...
So with that said, WoW actually created the modern trinity.
I've been playing table-top RPGs since I could hold a pencil, and I don't think any of them had any notion of an aggro mechanic. We had THAC0 and alignment languages, but never anything so stupid as the trinity.
In old-school CRPGS, it made sense to put your heavilly armored characters up front, but there was never any special mechanic that pigeon-holed characters like the current trinity does. As far as I know, all that originated with Everquest (I could be wrong -- I was playing UO back then, where everyone was a heavilly-armored mage and we bandaged our own damn selves).
yeah, agro (and by extension, trinity) was never mechanically enforced. The GM just sort of knew that the hulking warrior could take on more guys than the dude in a bath robe. It wasn't fun when people died, and it's not like the table top stuff was players vs GM or anything.
Every campaign I've ever played in didn't have a bunch of idiot enemies that target the character with the most hit points and did the least damage unless the enemies actually had a low wisdom or intelligence.
@OP - this whole topic is flawed. it's based on the premise that the trinity is tank/dps/healer. the trinity is tank/damage/healer. the term dps is the bi-product of the addon recount.
Originally posted by muffins89 @OP - this whole topic is flawed. it's based on the premise that the trinity is tank/dps/healer. the trinity is tank/damage/healer. the term dps is the bi-product of the addon recount.
The acronym dps has been around since Everquest, long before any addons were around.
All developers did were add mechanics to replace DM's and the players decision to jump in front of other players and such.
The trinity existed in DnD, it was simply handled different.
Was the trinity then the exact same thing as the trinity of today? No. Players had to be creative with feats and all of that to keep attackers focused on them. All MMO developers did was simplify the tanking from DnD and turn it into a provoke or w/e it is called in your preffered game.
The concept and the goals are exactly the same, the only thing thats changed is the means.
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Not really no. At least, it wasn't that way in any of the games I played. Your role was something like "fanatical priest of the war god with a penchant for cheap booze" or "unemployed pit fighter looking for the dwarf who killed his wife." The mechanics were there to facilitate the role-play, not to define the roles themselves.
Some MMOs in the past had 2 roles: DPS and healers.
Basically the more damage you made the fewer HPs or armorclass did you have. It is actually more complicated than that since the third class most of those games had were the thief which were a must in any dungeon for many years and still are in many P&P games.
And yes, when you did old dungeons the order you walked in were important, you put the mages last since it was harder for the enemies to reach them then which mean there were some body blocking. On the other hand did the thief always walk in front since traps were usually the main threat to the group besides the endboss.
The MMO trinity was invented in the modern form in the game "Meridian 59". Pen and paper had nothing close to that before. You never had a character that would take all attacks from the monsters while the healer keeps her alive before, unless you played with only 3 players in your group and only had one warrior/pally or other tough melee class.
The first MMOs were very close to boardgames like Descentand mostly about moving figures on the floorplans in a dungeon (we are talking "Chainmail here, the game Gygax invented that eventually got upgraded to D&D) but thye never really had a trinity mechanic anyways.
As a GM you usually let the monsters do the smart thing and target the wizard first followed by the cleric or the theif depending on the situation, the tougher characters will try to keep them alive by bodyblocking and tactics. And of course when someone have little HP left they are the main target.
Many other MMOs doesnt even have healers and some doesnt even have classes. Heck, some like Amber doesnt even use dices or cards either.
In short: The MMO trinity is a typical MMO thing but there were primitive systems (and in some cases rather advanced but very different) before it in P&P. P&P combat have always been a lot more focused on strategy than MMOs though and things like positioning and timing are more important there.
Been playing P&P since 1984 and MMOs since 1996, there are people here who played longer than me but I have a feeling they agree with me here.
Both MMOs and P&P RPGs are fun though, but they are different. And no, MMOs dont need the trinity combat, it was the first idea a small company thought of for the first real MMO and just assuming that it is the perfect system seems a bit weird to me. I would love if someone made a good porting of other P&P systems like Shadowrun, Runequest or ARS magica instead with the P&P system straight off. The bad part is that you dont fight so much in P&P as in MMOs so P&P systems are often a lot more deadlier.
There was absolutely role specializing before DnD and the trinity came from MMOS because groups could be comprised of every combination of classes but it was recomended to have certain roles covered.
I would also argue that the trinity should of been 4 roles with CC being the 4th but generally this was given to every role in some amount.
What is actually interesting to me is how roles have evolved because of the trinity. In the older days you could think of healing/DPS/tanking as quantities you do well with a certain amount of points divided between them. Does a healer do more or less damage now in comparison to a dps role? What about a tank?
Reading a bit further on, I find that the "trinity discussion" has become the "aggro discussion."
I guess, in effect, since no aggro management was used by your DM in D&D games, there was no tanking in your experience. Not every DM used a random roll to see who the mob would hit. Why did fighters wear the best armor they could get? Why did fighters get the higher hit dice per level? After all, isn't a human a human and a half-orc a half-orc? Why the variance depending upon the career one chooses? Those game mechanics tell me it was so they could take the brunt of the attacks. Unlike tanks in MMOs, they also could deal a lot of damage, which also sometimes factored into the monsters choice of target. I realize what you are arguing is the actual management of aggro. In my experience, we had some control over who the monster would hit because of our DM. It was not always a random dice roll to decide who they monsters would attack. I admit that EQ had an actual "taunt" skill, and thus aggro management became the norm and was probably the reason for term "the trinity" to be born, but that does not mean it did not exist beforehand.
I recall a battle my little group engaged in against a female troll and her young offspring. Our Fighter attacked the youngster and handily managed the momma troll's aggro. I laugh with the memory of the encounter because my DM was sick of us always asking, "What was the loot?" He said her "treasure" was an old dirty rag and an old gnawed on bone. "It was a treasure to her!" he informed us
As far as DPS goes, D&D combat was based on 6 second rounds. You could hit three times and miss 7 times in a turn (1 minute segment) of battle or hit all 10 times in the same turn. You could add up all the highly variable damage done by a player, divide it by the length of the battle and come up with their DPS. It really did not matter, though. The mechanic was there but rather pointless. Kind of like how it is in MMOs, wouldn't you say?
AIDS was not "discovered" before the late 19th, early 20th century. Does that mean it did not exist before then? Who knows? Maybe, long ago, deaths credited to the flu or a simple cold or chicken pox was actually AIDS and nobody labeled it as such. After all, AIDS attacks one's immune system and thus makes them susceptible to more common diseases. We will never know how long AIDS has been around. Does that mean that "the trinity" did not exist before it was coined for MMOs?
As I said previously, it really depends upon on how someone played D&D. A game mechanic DM would randomly roll for every action taken by a NPC. A roleplaying DM would react to the player's actions.
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There was never the degree of overspecialization in P&P games that you see in MMOs. Yes, a cleric could heal, but he could also take a punch pretty well. Fighters were durable, but they contributed a lot of damage; at lower levels, they did most of the damage really. With a balanced party -- which almost never happened in practice -- you didn't see any class totally marginalized into performing a single task. Even the wizard, the closest thing old-school D&D had to a pure damage class, could serve as a de facto tank with the right spells. It's easy to look back on the tactics players used and superimpose the current paradigm, but in reality combat was never as mechanical as it is in your garden-variety MMO.
Most importantly, there was never any game that had rules to determine which character enemies would attack (excluding 4th ed. D&D, which was an attempt to replicate MMO gameplay). And even if there had been, I suspect that most DMs would have ignored it.
Edit: To clarify, yes, you usually had the burly characters up front. But that is not what defines the trinity, or even a tank, in the current sense. When the "tank" does as much damage as the "DPS," the distinction between the two is meaningless. Mages, rangers and rogues had other tricks up their sleeves and were not defined only by the amount of damage they did. On the same note, you never had "healers" simply hang back and heal while everyone else did the fighting.
Yes, I agree with a lot of the posts in this tread, and with this paragraph in particular. Groups of players had to think and try to take advantage of the whole context of each encounter.Of course, the fighter would try to bait or bodyblock ennemies from coming too close to the casters. But that was just one of the tactics used, and its efficiency was depending entirely upon the goodwill of the game master. This baiting/bodyblocking of opponents was just one way of trying to use the strategy: "divide and conquer". We could also use spells that temporarily removed opponents from the actual fight (such as Sleep, Charm, Hold, Web etc). Or it could be spells that actually modified the combat scene, blocking a door or dividing a room in two, such as Web, Wall of Stone, etc. Anything to lessen the pressure on the party.
I agree with this. But if it all depends on how you play....meaning there is not a specific mechanic in the game rules, I would argue then it did not exist within the game.
I also don't think the AIDS example is a good analogy. AIDS is a medical term to apply to an illness. The illness was not intentionally created to bring definition to the term. The trinity, however, was actually manufactured by game designers.
What were the CRPGs you played a party of adventurers and there was taunt and aggro management? I'm not saying none exist, rather asking which ones had that. Most used party order, where you put the weaker ones in the back. And, again, defense/offense/support is the basic set of roles in team based conflict or competition. That is not the trinity as it exists in MMOs.
Think of your average CRPG. If someone suggested creating a character that couldn't really do damage but just took damage well, wouldn't you be confused as to why they were asking you to create half a character? What if they suggested that you put the thief in the front lines? You'd probably ask them why they thought it would be a good idea to put a 4-6 hp char in front of the fighters, priests and other characters with 8-16, right? Wouldn't you also find it rather odd to create your perfect party and then find out that the fighter has a Taunt button that he presses and everything attacks him, completely ignoring everything else that is doing damage to them? That would seem rather ridiculous.
Taunt and aggro management aren't really an MMO thing or even a class-based MMO thing. It is a band-aid over the basic combat system that became broken once collision (party order served that purpose in CRPGs) was removed and restrictive classes were made.
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I remember taunts as well. Taunt came from D&D if I'm not mistaken, as far as games are concerned.
It looks like there's been a passing reference to the origin of the trinity in mmo's but I don't think I saw anyone go into the actual history of what happened.
The trinity was one of several mmo terms that began in Everquest. Class balance had been poor at release and SOE took a wrecking ball to the whole thing with the release of the Kunark expansion. I have never seen an in-game community turn on its own as fast or as viciously as what happened in the two months after Kunark was released ( hybrids ... those poor bastards). Part of the fallout of the balance mess SOE had made of the game was that three classes were now considered indispensable for every high level group - warrior, cleric, and enchanter with just three spaces left over for everybody else.
The definition of trinity in mmo's have slightly changed over the years since then going from W/C/E (and I guess we will deign to allow a few of you plebians to tag along with us) of Everquest to the modern Tank/Healer/Dps.
Not so fun fact: This was the game that also gave birth the the infamous "working as intended".
So it actually was born from EQ? That was my original assumption as well but I didn't know the specifics of what you pointed out. Anyone else remember this?
Well, it must have predated (and discarded) the 1st ed AD&D and after because I don't ever recall fighters using taunt to force monsters to attack them. Monsters were forced to fight the fighters because they couldn't get past them. Tactical positioning was very important in D&D, even in the gold box and NWN games. And even then it wasn't foolproof. Ranged attackers would still target the magic users because they could cast or shoot past the fighters.
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Well, the roles did technically exist in DnD but they did not resemble anything we see today. You had a tank, but he had a myraid of things he could do. Besides being an insane damage dealer, the warrior could do a number of other things too. You could specialise them to be great at spotting traps, or making potions, or whatever. Feats defined a class as much as class skills did.
Hell a caster wasn't even a real damage dealer early on anyway. They were pure utility until nearly 12-15 when they had the spells and feats to support serious throwdown. Before that a warrior was easily better for killing things. He didn't have to sleep a day after each fight either. Clerics were basically tanks as we know them now. Nigh unkillable, heavy plate wearing, smash your face kinda guys....that also happened to turn the undead and heal you. I imagine most fighter types leaned toward barbarians anyway, simply because they could rage while supreme cleaving their way through 50 enemies in a row. Thieves and Assasins were neat, but my favorite incarnation was the shadow dancer. Getting that positional backstab was a ton easier when you could walk into the trees shadow and OUT of his.
I'm rambling, and I'm sorry. The point is that DnD had a trinity. But it cared more for being awesome than adhering to that trinity...so class role was more or less defined by the player. Nothing prevented you from having a druid tank while his feral bear pet and two treants bashed things in. They even gave you a druid spell that specifically turned metal armors into wood and another that allowed the wood to retain a high armor class. A wizard could wear plate, suck down some mage armor and punch faces. Or he could stop time and cast 4 rounds worth of spells at once. Whatever. A cleric could really focus on stats that allowed him to cast more heals...or he could bloody str con it out like a warrior and beat things up and heal himself when things got rough.
That was the fun part. Each character in DnD was varied BEFORE you even considered multiclassing. Now a game has to include multiclassing just to barely touch the surface of the character depth DnD had for its core class.
Building a group as a trinity was just a strategy adopted by the players to clear content faster. These were the power gamer types that existed even in the 70s and 80s. In DnD a lot of this depended on the GM if it was to be allowed.
Warhammer Fantasy Battle was a major factor in bringing the trinity to the forefront in gaming. In WFB the use of 3d minitures on a battlefield allowed defensive melee units to block the path of oposing melee units from taking out the magic and ranged units on the back lines. This is the earliest use of the term "tanking." Many of the tactics in WFB were copied from historical battle movements. Blame Ramseys of Egypt or Alexander the great for devising ancient battle strategy of stacking archers safely behind their melee units. The use of reserve troops could also be seen as a "healing" mechanic. As melee units were wounded or killed on the front lines the commander would bring in fresh troops from the back lines to relieve the wounded. Keeping a reserve is superior strategy than having everyone charge at once. Sure the Phonecians and Melachites didn't think the trinity was fair but who cares about them? They were conquered.
Bottom line here is the trinity is rooted in historical tactical battle strategy.
The term Trinity changed from EQ1 to WoW, it originally was Healer/Tank/Slower (or Healer/Tank/CC, depending on the circumstance), because DPS was just "everyone else" used to fill out a group, and the only people I know of that called themselves "DPS" were rangers who were desperate to get in a group (when they weren't busy trying to convince you that they were really the tank).
From 2003 - before WoW was even out:
http://www.thedruidsgrove.org/archive/eq/t-235.html
It's also the oldest post I could find where the group class makeup was referred to as "Trinity". (although I didn't look terribly exhaustively)
Really, if you want to get down to it, it just refers to a way that people commonly build their group - form the group around XXX group roles (with whatever class or play style can fulfill that), and your group will have a good chance of succeeding. In EQ, a group with a healer/tank/slower (or healer/tank/cc) had a good chance of taking on pretty well all group content. In WoW, a group with a healer/tank/dps has a good chance of taking on pretty well all group content.
It doesn't really have to do with the taunt mechanic - it just so happened that there were 3 roles that, if actively defined and filled, happened to make the content easier (probably because most of the content was designed around those 3 roles).
By no means was that the only way to get through content. I can remember one infamous group of mages on my old EQ1 server that loved to go around, and they would 1-group older raid content with their pets. No tanks, no slowers, no healers - completely defying the "Trinity" concept. Groups in EQ1 commonly were unorthodox - especially when the server populations started to decline in the mid-00's.
Nothing special about the term trinity really - it's just that so much content across so many games have been designed with that in mind that most people can't wrap their heads around anything else.
Personally, I loved the older EQ1 stuff, where the trinity wasn't so well-defined. Classes were very diverse, and roles weren't cookie-cutter and had to share common cross-class abilities. I also really love the newer games, where the trinity goes out the window - it makes life more chaotic, and I find it fun when it doesn't just break down to zergitmoar and can keep some semblance of tactics involved in the game play.
DnD still had classes, and roles, but it wasn't necessarily a trinity. You had a live person who was DMing who could fill the role of "Artificial Intelligence" a whole lot better than any computer program can do, and can work around mechanics that go beyond just the pen-and-paper rules, so roles could be a whole lot more diverse, players can be a whole lot more creative, and the DM could compensate or tailor the encounter around their players. In a game, if you come across a locked chest and don't have a rogue - well, you just keep on walking. In a Pen-n-Paper game, maybe someone hacks the box open, or you decide to pick it up and carry it back to town, or maybe you fireball it and melt the lock off - or any number of infinite possibilities that players could come up with when they aren't constrained within the limits of an artificial game engine.
yeah, agro (and by extension, trinity) was never mechanically enforced. The GM just sort of knew that the hulking warrior could take on more guys than the dude in a bath robe. It wasn't fun when people died, and it's not like the table top stuff was players vs GM or anything.
You make me like charity
Before WoW the 'trinity' actually was a quartet that included a crowd control class of some kind. A tank would NOT survive engaging multiple mobs at once and a CC class was essential in ensuring only one target was ever actively engaged in the battle. EQ1 and EQ2 (in the early days at least) both had this, but WoW did away with it and no MMO since has allowed CC to be that useful...
So with that said, WoW actually created the modern trinity.
Every campaign I've ever played in didn't have a bunch of idiot enemies that target the character with the most hit points and did the least damage unless the enemies actually had a low wisdom or intelligence.
The acronym dps has been around since Everquest, long before any addons were around.
All developers did were add mechanics to replace DM's and the players decision to jump in front of other players and such.
The trinity existed in DnD, it was simply handled different.
Was the trinity then the exact same thing as the trinity of today? No. Players had to be creative with feats and all of that to keep attackers focused on them. All MMO developers did was simplify the tanking from DnD and turn it into a provoke or w/e it is called in your preffered game.
The concept and the goals are exactly the same, the only thing thats changed is the means.