The Tank

I've been tinkering with and expanding my very-nearly-a-Risus-hack from a while ago. Specifically, I was thinking about character roles. One of the things that's brilliant about Risus is that you get to define your character archetype - in fact, you get to pick several archetypes that apply to your character in different degrees.

I'll try not to get sidetracked on this discussion - I've started and scrapped posts about it before - but archetypes are really, really useful in rpgs. I make the case here that genre and tone are effectively the most important parts of an rpg, to the point where if you have those dialed in, you can pretty much run a satisfying game with, maybe, a super-slim rules system. In fact, the rules are almost unnecessary, because they're there to tell the GM how certain situations play out, and if you have a super clear vision of the genre and tone, they'll tell you the likely outcome of any given situation. And character archetypes are basically a way of keying into that. If you have an archetype, the question goes from "Is it plausible for someone in this sort of fiction to be able to do x?" to "Is it plausible for a swashbuckler/paranormal investigator/space marine to be able to do x?" And then right away you've got differentiation among characters, specific skillsets and roles, etc etc. The nice thing about the Risus "Cliché" (the archetypes you give your characters) is that it has its cake and eats it by being simultaneously extremely freeform, with players coming up with their own from scratch, but also by avoiding sacrificing that specificity; I considered replacing clichés with skills, but I realised they didn't perform the same service with regards to genre. You'd keep the freedom of character creation, but you'd be a little bit lost regarding your character's identity.

Before I wrap up the aside, I'll just say that this is why I don't have much time for arguments that race-as-class doesn't give enough freedom or whatever. Race-as-class is just archetype-as-class, and classes are archetypes at bedrock anyway - that's their reason for existing. Likewise, in contemporary D&D you sometimes get a snootiness directed at players who play a dwarf who acts like Gimli, a wise old wizard, a brave and loyal human fighter etc. The thought is that these characters are constrained or unoriginal, but in fact, these players are adopting archetypes to which they can add their own fine detail. That's at least as original as the word-salad race-multiclass combos you get in 5e, and more so, if, as it appears, these snooty accusers (only partly imaginary, I assure you) are actually committing the fallacy of conflating character with class - playing a dwarf who fits the dwarf archetype but who builds on it to create a unique, finely detailed character is better than playing a half-genasi cleric 3 warlock 5 whose characterisation consists entirely in that string of jargon, and doesn't extend beyond it.

It's like TV writing. If you tell me that "Themes are for eighth grade book reports", then you're either a genius or an idiot. And unless you go on and commit some pretty visionary work to film, I'm just going to deduce that you don't know what themes are, or how they work.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, veering perilously close to the Angry GM's "Absent minded and performatively angry curmudgeon" brand. Better do a quick turnaround - that stuff's patented, and I value my kneecaps.

So character roles. I was thinking what you'd do in my game if you wanted to build a tank, as in the character on the team who sits in front of the enemy and absorbs/deflects damage, while the less resilient party members do other things. First, tactical combat isn't really a thing in the game, so there's not really an option to optimise a character for the role per se. So the solution would be to choose a cliché or archetype that embodied it.

I say "would be" because I don't think there really are any. You could go for "Doughty Dwarf Warrior" or "Resilient Space Marine", but those would probably be only tangentially what you wanted - without going into systemic detail (although the temptation is real), they wouldn't really fare better performing the tank role than any other combat-oriented character. And so it occurred to me that the tank isn't really an archetype from fiction, at least much of fiction. Superhero and anime fiction are a special case, which I'll come to in a moment.

Think about the Lord of the Rings (as I do often). The only people who try a tanking manoeuvre, i.e.: one where they deliberately put themselves in harms way to help others less strong than themselves are Boromir when he buys Merry and Pippin time to escape (or tries to), and Gandalf fighting the Balrog so the fellowship can escape. Both times the move is seen as an incredibly valorous act - neither character survives (spoilers). And this tells you why people in fiction don't tank: Tanking is dangerous.

Tanking is Dangerous

What I mean is, tanking has to be dangerous for the move to have narrative significance. Even if you don't die or suffer major consequences, the threat has to be there, otherwise the character can't demonstrate growth or loyalty or bravoury or whatever by doing it - it's narratively redundant. If you have a character archetype based entirely around tanking again and again, you have to decrease the narrative significance of doing so accordingly. So in a game that generates enjoyment from combat manoeuvres that are, taken individually, fairly narratively redundant (not actually a bad thing), tanking is fine, but not so much in a game where combat is valued squarely in terms of the narrative.

And the obvious corollary is that tanking decreases the threat of combat. When you have a character archetype specifically geared to taking more hits than an ordinary person, with no consequences, the threat, and thereby the thrill, of combat starts to erode (it's a different matter if they're slowly ground down by constantly putting themselves in harm's way, day after day, but then their role as tank comes with consequences - and an expiry date). This is quite an old chestnut, so I won't harp on it too much, but the point is that if you have a character whose job is to stand in front of the spears or bullets or whatever, the stakes for doing so tend to evaporate; they've done it before, and they'll presumably live to do it again, so this isn't a life or death struggle (at least not for them).

This is where superhero and anime fiction come in. They have tanks, and often the chief protagonist will be pretty tanky, but they also suffer a problem with injecting combat with stakes and narrative significance. To an extent this can be mitigated for by coolness. You don't have to have every move in D&D combat be emotionally loaded for the combat to be fun, because enacting strategies with a semi-random outcome is fun independently of that. Likewise, you can get a fairly long way in a combat with little narrative significance in an anime or superhero flick if the fight itself is fun and cool enough. This can absolutely be taken too far, of course. But we also see this sort of media attempt to inject stakes into combat that wouldn't usually be deadly to the home team, usually via hostages or the requisite kryptonite shiv-du-jour, or the classic anime "This enemy is more powerful than any of our previous enemies by this much (I really mean it this time)", all of which can be a bit clunky. All of this just goes to prove the point that the tank saps the stakes and tension out of combat in a way that needs to be adjusted for.

Is this where the tank in tabletop gaming came from, i.e.: superhero fiction and anime/manga? I'm not sure. There's undoubtedly been an influence, especially on the superhero side, in later editions of D&D, but it's debatable how far back that goes. Gygax and Arneson were big comics fans, but generally the older editions of D&D (and contemporaries like T&T and Runequest) are too deadly to allow for a character with the specific tank role - you have people who can take more hits than the others, sure, but the emphasis seems to be on attempting to ensure as far as possible that nobody takes any hits, rather than having someone whose job is to take the hits for the team. You have your front-row fighters (as much to get hit by traps as for when combat breaks out), but any OD&D Fighting-Man whose first recourse was to rush towards the enemy and tie up their attention while their party-mates cast spells and slung arrows probably wouldn't make it very far. Add to this deadliness that the rules for combat weren't particularly conducive to the sort of zone-control the tank usually employs (no opportunity attacks or the like), and any party role in the early editions that you might want to call the tank is scarcely specialised enough to merit the name.

The Tank

I think this rules out the idea that the role sprang straight from the fiction that originally inspired gaming, although I'm willing to be disproven if anyone can find an early White Dwarf or Dragon article discussing tanking. For my money, the tank is something that evolved from the exigencies of gameplay on the tabletop, as successive iterations of games with well-defined party roles, and videogames inspired by them, especially in the Japanese rpg boom of the 80s and 90s, pushed those sorts of mechanical party roles into the public consciousness, or at least the consciousnesses of those people making media for nerds. So I think the tank in gaming actually largely inspired the tank in media, hence its sitting somewhat at odds with the narrative stakes that combat has in media. There are counterexamples, but I'm not sure if there are enough to constitute a trend. Certainly we can discern here an interesting case of game mechanics influencing culture, even if the mechanics weren't necessarily the ultimate progenitor of the trope.

And, to return to my initial worry, I feel perfectly happy that, in my system, taking one for the team is a risky move, and not routine.