Classes for Settings

As we know, D&D is a game of archetypes. This is the basis of the class system, and is a feature not a bug - sure, there are distinct limitations of forcing everyone into a class, and other systems therefore have some advantages, but it is what it is.

To a certain extent, the game has embraced archetypes in other areas of the design. This is most apparent in 4e's monster design (probably the best presentation of monsters to date), with their various roles.

However, I'm inclined to think that the game would be well-served to embrace those archetypes rather more fully in other areas. As such, I'm leaning towards the notion that magic items should essentially be divided based on their power sources (as I've discussed in another post), with some sources allowing items to do some things that other sources just can't. And I've likewise mentioned that NPCs should probably be built using some form of personality archetypes as well.

For settings, then, I think I'd be inclined to suggest that the game should also embrace archetypes. Specifically, each setting should have a major archetype (jungle, desert, dungeon, urban...), then a sub-archetype (caves, lair, tomb, temple...), and finally one or two customisation elements - much as characters have a class, sub-class, and feats.

Each of these would then alter one or more aspects of game play in that setting. So in the jungle your main issue might be the extreme humidity while in the desert it's the lack of water that's a problem. Tombs should generally play out rather differently to simple cave networks, and so on.

There's a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, by making each environment fairly simple (one effect each for archetype, sub-archetype, and customisation), and making it easy to summarise these, the game makes it more likely that those environmental effects get moved into the foreground, rather than just being yet another bit of background noise that gets ignored (like encumbrance).

Secondly, by typing the effects into archetypes, the game creates a consistent feel - all dungeons have some things in common, while all urban environments have some other things in common.

And, thirdly, it means that as the heroes move from one environment to another, the game shift with them - sure, those effects may not be much, but if the jungle is distinctly different from the dungeons, then when the heroes stop hacking though the jungle and instead enter the Lost Temple, it feels like they've gone from the one to the other.

Of course, that would necessitate adjusting the presentation of the DMG to bring together these archetypes, but that's probably no bad thing - at present, all that information already exists but largely goes unused because it gets filed under Major Boring Shit. At worst, this approach makes no difference to that.

Or maybe it just doesn't work. Who knows?