As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that certain patterns of the role-playing genre of game (think Dungeons & Dragons, or a 1990s Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy console RPG) applies to organizational subgroups as they battle the recurring hostilities– whether they be random overworld encounters or plot-driven boss fights– of a cost-cutting, anti-progress organization such as a modern corporation. The archetypes apply: you have your healing mages who cure the wounded, the “tank” fighters built to take and deal large amounts of damage, and the vaguely distrusted, but powerful, offensive or “black” mages who are useless in physical combat but can, when needed, bring out the high-power spells that end the fight, right there. Whether one’s notion of “party” is a project-centered team or a looser collection of like-minded souls with similar interests, it’s important to know the composition of one’s party. Who’s the “tank”, or fighter? Do you have a white mage? Do you have a black mage? How many in each do you have, in your party?
It’s worthwhile to examine the archetypes, what they have in common, and how they diverge.
1. Physical classes
Physical classes are characterized, in an RPG, by physical combat. Magical characters tend to be intermittent and require more strategy to play them, because their most powerful spells are often limited using something a Magic Point (MP) system, while physical characters are consistent and reliable. Mostly, physical characters are built to do the same thing, over and over: swing a broadsword, pick-pocket the enemy, run away and keep the party safe, or bash the dragon with a closed fist.
In the workplace, these are the additive contributors. They keep the business running, they can power through grunt work, and they seem to have limitless stamina for battle. (Anyone who can swing a broadsword while wearing sixty pounds of armor– something I’ve done, and it’s not easy– for more than a few minutes has impressed me.) They don’t run out of power (MP) and, while they can run out of health (“hit points”, or HP) they usually have far more HP than the mages do.
Oddly enough, the hitpoint system is more realistic a model of corporate combat than it is of any kind of physical combat. Hit point systems don’t model the fragility of the human body very well. If a drunk guy with a baseball bat does 1d4 damage and you have 50 hit points, you don’t have to worry about him, even unarmed; whereas in the real world, that person can kill you if he hits an organ. The myriad ways in which a human body can be destroyed or, at least, severely fucked-up aren’t usually reflected in a hit point system wherein a night at an inn can lead to full recovery. In the corporate world, a hit-point system can adequately monitor social status, with maximum hit points representing your official or titular status (e.g. where you are in the organizational hierarchy) as per your level, and current hit points representing your de facto status as it fluctuates. When you get to 0 HP, you’ve lost credibility and can’t get anything done (incapacitated) and, if you take much more damage, you’ll be “perma”-killed — if anyone’s not getting it, this means fired.
One criticism of HP systems in role-playing games is that they poorly model the human constitution, because a low-level character is fragile while a high-level character can endure a dragon’s flame well enough to cleave the lizard-freak’s skull with a battle axe. That may not represent physical reality (in which, again, some jerk with a handgun is a real threat, even if you’re a “level 20 fighter”) but it does model corporate combat. Let’s say that, in the corporate RPG, you end up in a surprise overworld encounter, where some fucking Goblin accuses you of being “not a team player” in a meeting with your boss. That might be 8 hit points of damage. If you’re a Level 1 black mage with a maximum HP of 10, that’s a serious blow; if you’re a Level 20 fighter (C-level title, with lots of contacts inside and outside the company) with 175 HP, you can laugh it off and annihilate the Goblin with a counterattack.
1.A. The fighter classes
Fighters are offense-focused, physical classes. They’re built to deal and take damage, and given the name of “tanks” for this reason. They absorb blows and shield the party. They’re reliable, unless they get hit with status ailments that put them out of commission, and then the party feels it, because enemies that should be dying quickly won’t be, unless the mages get involved. There are two kinds of fighters: knights and brawlers.
1.A.i. Knights
Knights are capable of using all the finest weaponry and armor. Their drawback is that they need it. The knight is usually the most expensive member of the party: half of the gold is going to be spent on upgrading his gear. A regular broadsword or battle axe won’t do the job, not past Level 5: he needs a mithril sword that shoots fire!
In the corporate world, the knight sometimes comes off as a prima donna. He’ll take bullets for the team, but he needs to be reassured that he’s leading it. Give him a fancy title and a large budget for his projects, and you’ll see him fight harder and better than almost anyone else. Send him out into a battle with a bent spear and the clothes on his back, and he’ll be next to useless. Knights don’t like being underdogs.
Knights also aren’t known for dexterity. Brute strength is where they excel. At level 15, you’ll frequently see one slay a Boardroom Dragon on her own. They’re impressive in battle and excel against the strongest and most imposing opponents. Erratic change frustrates and confuses them, however. In single combat with an unscrupulous and nimble brawler, they often lose, because they can’t hit the rat bastard.
1.A.ii. Brawlers
Brawlers lack the grace and honor of knights, but they’re phenomenally effective without equipment. A knight needs to feel backed by his organization and team in order to take on a project. Brawlers, on the other hand, are down for a bare-fisted fight, even against a wraith or a dragon.
Brawlers tend to be young, in the corporate world as well as in RPGs, perhaps for an obvious reason: unless they change classes, they don’t live long. The brawler likes a fight where he’s the underdog. Startups love brawlers, who’ll throw down weekends on “death march” projects in order to turn a 0% chance of success into 5 percent. Brawlers tend to become known for their seemingly selfless sacrifice, which means that they accrue lay credibility within the organization, and appear to ratchet up the hit points and become very powerful. The problem is that, unless backed by a healer, they fare poorly against high-level enemies with advanced strategies and powers (e.g. instant death spells, confusion and control effects).
1.B. Thieves
Thieves are, perhaps, an unfortunately-named character class. The thief is dexterous, and a capable pickpocket, but he’s usually not a bad guy. “Thief” refers to a skill set, not a parasitic lifestyle. He’ll skank a few Heal Potions off of some wolves (odd that they’d have those, but even odder that they carry gold) but he only robs the enemies. (It’d make the game easier if he were a traditional theif. Less grinding to buy toys for the knights and mages.) He’s also good at running away, and this usually saves the whole party from an undesirable encounter.
The corporate thief, like the RPG character class, isn’t always a bad guy. There are good thieves and bad ones, but they’re a useful addition to any party. In the corporate world, thieves don’t actually steal, and are more like spies than robbers. They’re good at getting information, sizing up opponents, and running away from dangerous encounters. If your project is about to fail or get cancelled, the thief will be the first to figure it out and run away. And you should run away with her.
Thieves are usually decent fighters, but it’s not what they do best. Where they excel is in their quickness. They can change projects, technology stacks, and reporting structures more quickly than anyone else. They flow like water, fit anywhere, and at high levels, become phenomenally adept at responding to new circumstances.
1.C. Novelty classes
Most RPGs have a novelty class or few: the Goof-Off in the Dragon Quest franchise, the Mimic in the Final Fantasy series, the Dancer and the Diviner and the Beastmaster. Novelty classes are generally under-powered in most circumstances, but immensely powerful in some. Usually, you have to go on the Internet to figure out the details, but there’s some strategy that makes the novelty class immensely powerful. One variously represented novelty class is the Gil Tosser (see: Samurai in FFV and Setzer in FFVI) who throws gold coins at enemies, doing immense damage. You don’t want to do this too often, because you’ll lose gold faster than you can get it back, but it just might work against That One Boss that nothing else can beat. The corporate parallel of this (“throw money at it till it dies”) is obvious.
Novelty classes can be purely physical, but sometimes they have magical abilities. This plays out in the corporate world as well: I once worked at a company whose CEO had a bad temper and fired a lot of good people. Under him was an executive who was fantastically good at getting fired ex-employees back on board as consultants and less-than-exorbitant rates. That’s the Necromancer class: it is not often useful to consult the dead, but there are times when it’s immensely powerful.
People who are in novelty classes usually appear in consulting or contingent roles, because companies realize that, while they’re sometimes useful, they don’t need them very often.
2. The Magical Classes
Physical fighters are reliable and strategically boring, while mages are intermittent and exciting. If you overdraw the mage’s Magic Power (MP) you will now have a completely useless individual in your party, but if you use the mages strategically, they’re extremely effective. Fighters excel at additive contributions: if you do 30 HP of damage to the HR Wraith (a mini-boss you have to defeat in order to get a fourth slot in your party, which is requisite for advancing the plot) this turn, 40 HP the next turn, and 25 HP after that, you’ve done 95 HP of damage to the HR Wraith. Mages’ effects are multiplicative: if three spells are cast to double your Fighter’s effectiveness, he’s 8 times more effective; and that 400 HP Meteor Shower spell that annihilates the otherwise untouchable Diamond Golem might mean the difference between a total-party kill and everyone gaining a level.
The drawback of the mage is that, being a more creative sort of person, he’s fragile. Mages need to be protected, because it doesn’t take much damage to incapacitate them and turn the magic off. Except for the Sage, it’s rare that you’ll see someone in a magical class leading a party. Often, they just don’t have the hit points for it.
2.A. The typical mage classes.
The magical classes are harder to cluster. I’d separate them into the typical and atypical kind. Typical mages are still intermittent but have an obvious use in battle, and can usually be put to work to do something, such as cast low-level spells that don’t cost much; while atypical mages usually fit into specific strategic niches very well, but may underperform if their skills can’t be put to use.
2.A.i. Offensive (or “black”) mages.
The black mage typically does the same thing that fighters do: kill the enemy before it kills you. The difference is in their intermittency and the strategic skill with which their stamina must be deployed. A fighter can throw down 16-hour day after 16-hour day of additive work to meet a deadline. The black mage will think for a little bit, toss out a spell (say, automating a time-consuming process) that kills the enemy with great fanfare, and then need to rest at an inn. Black mages, with their frequent multiplicative contributions, are bad at grinding, but indispensable in boss battles and against enemies that can’t be harmed by physical damage. In the corporate world, they’re the less reliable but talented employees who “hit the high notes” that no one else can.
Black mages aren’t necessarily “bad”, but their focus is on offense, and they’ll often pull out powerful spells when they aren’t appropriate, e.g., lobbing fireballs in a forest. In physical combat, they tend to be the weakest in the party because magic is hard on the body, yo. In the corporate world, these are your intermittent overperformers who can achieve great things when protected by a “tank”, but who don’t withstand a lot of direct damage. Black mages are often described as “eggshells with machine guns”. Most of the best programmers are black mages.
2.A.ii. Healing and supportive (“white”) mages.
The white mage is, arguably, the most important character in the party. Even in the overworld, fighting enemies all day is exhausting. Your hit points drop perilously close to zero and, much more annoyingly, you get hit with status effects (paralysis, poison, confusion, blindness) that fuck up your performance. You might even get killed. (Don’t worry; unless the plot demands it, perma-death is rare. Or is it?) If your white mage is alive and able, you’re fine. If you have no white mage, or your white mage is dead, you’re fucked.
In the corporate world, white mages are multiplicative but often in an assistive sort of way. They mentor and support others. They say good things about their party members (+20 HP!) in meetings. They counsel employees through status ailments (burnout, organizational malaise, confusion) and health problems. They build processes and write programs that make others around them more effective. Like all mages, they aren’t strong in hit points (or, in the corporate world, political credibility) because their best work is often behind-the-scenes. They’re just as mortal as anyone else and, when they’re killed, things go to hell rapidly.
2.B. Atypical mages
Healers and offensive battle mages have obvious roles in any corporate organization or RPG party, but certain “atypical” mage types can be very powerful, in the right circumstances. These mages, however, are sometimes preferred for consulting roles over permanent slots in the party, because it’s rare that their critical skills can be deployed every single turn, against every single enemy.
2.B.i. Summoners
A summoner may or may not be powerful, in physical combat or as a magician, but she has the power to conjure a beast that is, to use the words of John Oliver, fucking terrifying. Or she might summon an angel that heals the party. Summon spells are typically very costly, but extraordinarily effective.
The corporate summoner is the employee who knows a lot of high-talent people, the sorts who aren’t on the job market for very long or who might only work as consultants at $5,000 per day. The summons are expensive, but when they’re worth it, they’re amazing. Summoners become known not only for the work they do, but for the teams they can build around them. Unfortunately for the Summoner, this is a low-HP character class as well. A few successful summons can change a company– for the better, one hopes– but before there are any, the Summoner is vulnerable to attack (“What exactly have you done here?”) and easy for the enemies to kill.
The Summoner class is low in power in the early levels (“chocobo droppings, great!”) but, at high levels, often makes the game.
2.B.ii. Blue Mages
Blue Mages are a concept that I ripped from the Final Fantasy franchise (specifically, FFV). Blue Mages learn spells from their enemies. A blue mage who is the target of a spell will, if alive at the end of the battle, learn it. (This requires a healer if the spell is fatal.) Blue mages are often more resilient than the other magical classes, and have to be, because their power is derived from being lightning rods for the enemies’ random shit. Like summoners, blue mages are weak when they start out, but become powerful as they level up and develop massive libraries of past experience and observed patterns. The Blue Mage’s motto is “I’ve seen this shit before.” Then he annihilates an enemy in one blow.
Blue Mages often make great consultants, because they gain strength by experiencing as many different kinds of adversity as they can handle. Unfortunately, they’re sometimes an irritation to the rest of the party, which is imploring her to run away from the unbeatable foe, not stick around to get blasted by a Death Ray spell because a 100% Game requires it.
2.B.iii. Sages
The Sage is my favorite character class, because I am one. Sages can power through grunt work like fighters, spy on and steal from their enemies like thieves, heal and mentor the team like white mages, and blast hard-to-kill enemies (that is, solve technically or politically difficult problems) like black mages. Sages are down for anything. “Mithril Axe? PetaFlare spell? I’ll figure it out.” Sages take longer to level up, because they’re getting good at so many things, but a high-level Sage can make the game for a party. Sages might be an over-powered class, and most RPGs limit them for this reason. So what’s the problem? As a sage, I’m qualified to speak on it: Sages are fucking old. (I’m 32. That’s 95 in software years.)
Sages don’t have the hit points of a brawler or knight, but they’ll lead the party and play the “tank” role for a different reason: they don’t give a fuck. The sage knows that, being old, he’s going to have be killed at some point to advance the plot. “The ending credits will show me happy in the afterlife, and my great-granddaughter gets a starring role if a sequel is made. I’ll take that.” This might be good for the sage, but it leaves the party with a sage-shaped hole that makes the next fifty-or-so random encounters more difficult.
In the corporate world, the sage is often admired but distrusted because he’s “too experienced”. His knowledge betrays a history of breaking rules and frequent conflict. His courage indicates that he’s aware of his ancient status and has one foot in the afterlife already (the corporate “afterlife” meaning, getting another job and, one hopes, a better one). Of the mage classes, the Sage is often the most equipped to lead and be the tank, but he’s still a mage at heart: somewhat fragile, somewhat intermittent, and driven into the lead not by virtue of having the best armor, but by an aged lack of fear.
On paper, everyone likes the sage, the all-purpose badass, but he’s going to die (or, in the corporate world, change jobs) soon, because the plot usually requires as much, and everyone knows it.
What to make of all this
How should one build a party in the corporate world? (I’ll avoid discussing specific console RPGs.) Let’s analyze this by party size: do you get three, four, five, or six members in your party? First things first: you need a white mage, and you must protect him, which means that you need a physical “tank”. Your White Mage can heal the team’s motivation and spirit, and restore its HP (that is, fix its reputation). Without the healer, you are fucked. This is RPG 101, and it applies to the corporate world, and unfortunately the white mages are the first people nicked when adversity comes around. Execs can’t see what they do on a day-to-day basis (hence, the healer’s low HP) and so it doesn’t take a lot to kill one.
Beyond the white mage, it’s important to have some offensive capability, as well as the protective capacity that comes from a high-HP fighter class. Your party is going to be called upon to solve technical and political challenges, and you have to be able to blow through them and take some hits. For political challenges, you need a fighter of some sort: preferably a well-equipped knight, because brawlers tend to lack grace and chivalry. For technical challenges, you’re going to want an offensive mage of some sort: a black mage or a summoner or blue mage. Generally, the black mage is the lowest-risk and easiest-to-find option. This gets you the traditional first three slots: the fighter, the healer, and the offensive mage. As a minimal party, that’s usually enough.
For the fourth slot, I’d say that it comes down between a thief and a sage, depending on the needs of the party. They’re both adequate, but not exceptional, classes when it comes to physical combat. This means that they can fill in for the fighter, though it’s not what they do best. Which is preferable depends on the challenges that the party expects, but I’d generally favor the thief. Thieves excel at physical defense and, in the corporate world, that means that they’re good at deflecting blame away from the party. That’s a powerful skill, and not one that sages (or any magical class) are good at. The fifth slot, I would say, should go to a sage. Sages can fill any of the other roles reasonably well, and the plot usually requires having one. Unfortunately, the same plot that requires the sage will often require her sacrifice.
What if circumstances permit a sixth slot in the party? It’s rare that an RPG allows a party that large. At that point, one can usually afford a character from one of the novelty classes, since the bases are covered. One upshot of the corporate world is that 80 percent of the people fit into the weird, hard-to-find-a-use-for, novelty classes: the corporate Bean Counter with bad flatulence, the HR Geist who can move through walls and wear undead-only armor, the Delegator and the Rock Star who can liven up that opera scene. Why not bring one into the party, to see some amusing new attacks? One caveat, though… if you bring in a novelty-class character named Biggs or Wedge, then worry. Shit’s about to get real.
