My Life As A Gamer: The Fallacy of the Holy Trinity

In MMORPGs, and backported to other RPGs, you have this concept of "The Holy Trinity": Tank, Healer, DPS. The Tank captures hostile NPCs' attention and keeps it focused on him, letting them wail on him because he can take it like a tank. The Healer is self-explanatory. "DPS" is short for "Damage Per Second", and it means the high-firepower/high-fragility sorts (in practice, at least) that needs the other two to function optimally. For those of you more used to tabletop RPGs, think in terms of Sword & Board plate-armored Fighter as your Tank, a Cleric or White Mage as your Healer, and a Black Mage or Thief as your DPS.

The idea is that your Tank "picks up" the hostiles, the Healer keeps everyone up and fighting, while the DPS focuses fire and melts targets down as fast as possible. For some godawful reason, this is now part of RPG Cargo Cult Design, and therefore treated as if it were gravity. It's finally getting to the point that lots of people are noticing and cutting videos about it and not just one or two here and there.

THIS IS ABSOLUTE HORSESHIT!

Every critique of the Trinity fails to acknowledge that (a) it only arose when RPGs got ported to Multi-User Dungeons, the precursors to MMORPGs, and (b) it was a workaround to address a technical limitation of the medium: the lack of collision detection.

That's it. That's why it exists. The inability to body-block, to form a shield wall, to assume a phalanx or tesudo formation and otherwise control the space merely by being there and not because a piece of code says you can is why Tanks are a thing and without Tanks you don't have a Holy Trinity.

You don't have DPS without a Tank. You have no need for a dedicated Healer, constantly throwing heals during combat, without a Tank. You don't have concerns over Tanks keeping hostile attention--"pulling aggro", "losing enmity", or whatever the term is--if you can body-block because you can just take and hold a choke or form a shield wall and it's back to modelling how things actually work instead of having to cope with a technical defect that causes counter-intuitive behaviors.

And yet, despite the fact that the videogame engines are well past the point where such a defect need be a thing, you still have this bastard practice going on. Normie gamers are so habituated that they all but do a Blue Screen of Death when confronted with a RPG that doesn't do the Holy Trinity- especially on the tabletop, where this was never a thing.

There is no excuse now for games to cater to this cancerous practice anymore than they have to have classes, levels, hit points, or mana. It's all mindless aping of past practices when the conditions necessitating them are long obsolete and thus remove the justification for those practices to even exist at all. It's long past time to remove them, move on, and make full use of the real capabilities of the game engines now available.

They're crutches, and you don't need them. Put them away, and make your game truly great in doing so.