These are not the roles you are looking for: The three facets of roles in RPGs.
The term “role”, as it relates to MMOs, bothers me because it has drifted from its original meaning in table-top RPGs, where you played as an elf wizard or a dwarf fighter or some other race-class combination. In this sense, role was primarily a performative (or theatrical) category. To a lesser extent in the table-top world, role also meant the functional roles which are more prominent in MMOs, that of tank, healer, and dps (and perhaps various utility classes). Groups and guilds in MMOs, with the somewhat more difficult task of organizing people who may not know each other offline, added another dimension, that of social roles, such as guild leaders, group organizers, recruiters, and others. The role of dungeon master (or game master), although vital to table-top, is not one of the roles referred to by RPG—it does not even exist in MMOs, where everything is scripted and run automatically by computer. In this essay, I will explore these three concepts of role in RPGs (performative, functional, social), showing how I think not addressing these three different facets causes scholars to miss some important dimensions of gaming, although delineating role-playing games and settings is not always straightforward. Not all MMOs are considered RPGs in this way, such as EVE Online, here I will focus on more classically built, fantasy-based, MMOs. To some extent this is a distinction between CRPGs (computer role-playing games) and TTRPGs (table-top role-playing games), but not all games in each category are the same in terms of the roles therein.
Performative
Performative roles in RPGs stem from table-top gaming, and are the original role in “role-playing game”, yet this category of role is the weakest in most MMOs where it is viewed as a bit nerdy for many MMO players. Role playing is where your character is “a snobby high elf wizard” or “a dwarf fighter who is traumatized by the loss of his brother to goblins and drinks to ease the pain”, or something like that where you performatively play the role of your character (as described by Fine as well as Hoover and co-authors). This approach to roles is so secondary in many MMOs that, depending on the game, role-playing servers or guilds are labeled as such—it is not the default way to play and needs to be indicated since most MMO players do not want to play roles in this manner. (This theatrical setting is even more pronounced with LARPs [live-action RPGs], which can be a weekend of playing a half-elf ranger with several dozen other people also playing as characters, and can be an important part of cosplay.)
Functional
Roles in MMOs became focused on responsibility within the adventuring group (to attempt dungeons and raids). You need a tank, you need dps, you need healers and maybe utility, depending on the game. Tank, dps, and healer are so well established that at times they are referred to as “the holy trinity” for MMOs. These roles are needed in TTRPGs like D&D as well, but they aren’t addressed as directly for at least two reasons. One is that, in a TTRPG, you don’t have a large guild roster of players who may all want in on Friday’s raid, you have who you have, and it’s probably a much smaller and long-term play group. In TTRPGs and small guilds, your roster is fixed. When you have larger groups of players to choose from, and when the game mechanics fix how the game is played (you need a tank, dps, heals, etc.), you need to determine who will fill which roles. As such, you need labels for those roles so you can determine who fills them, and players need to be able to say which roles they can fill. These roles are so established that breaking the norm can be a fun group event, such as running a dungeon or raid with only one class.
Secondly, tank, healer, and dps do exist in TTRPGs, but, at least in the versions of D&D with which I am familiar, this approach to roles is not as important or as straightforward. Fighters who would be tanks in an MMO are both tank and dps. A traditional D&D cleric is part tank (due to armor), healer, dps, and utility. You will need a thief at some point to pick a lock or detect and disarm a trap—these are important functions in the D&D world but don’t fit nicely into simplified MMO categories. Single-player party-based CRPGs based on D&D rules are more like D&D in their need for party balance (as are other party-based games like both the Ultima and Wizardry series), but like an MMO are run by the computer. Single-player CRPGs, of course, do not have any of the social needs that come with having social groups like we find in MMOs and, in a different manner, with TTRPGs.
Social
In MMOs, one important role is the guild leader or leaders, who usually act as guiding hands for the overall activities of the players in the guild. But with table-top, there are no guilds. Instead, the main person who is in charge of the activities is the dungeon master (or game master), who is importantly not a player. They run the narrative. In an MMO, there is no equivalent person. The narrative is built of quests and goals built by the developers (often the writers). Once written into the code, it is fixed (albeit scripted and often branching). There is no human running or guiding the action like a dungeon master. In some respects, this is a huge difference. The role of dungeon master is vital in TTRPGs, yet this is not a role covered by the concept of “role” in RPG and it is absent in CRPGs. Guild leaders, and perhaps guild event coordinators, do organize events, dungeon runs, and raids, getting the action started like a DM, but once you get going on the activity, the action is determined by the game code (so to some extent, the computer program is like the DM but is rather unflexible).
Without guilds to organize within the game, TTRPGs do not need guild leaders, recruiters, a social event coordinator (playing the TTRPG is the social event), a person who keeps track of all the stats and builds so you don’t have to, or a person who organizes the guild hall storage and shared guild bank. Social roles are vital to MMOs, and if not carried out correctly, guilds can fall apart (as many have noted). This holds true for TTRPG groups as well, in terms of how the players actually get along, too much friction and they can lose players.
Conclusion
It is too easy to gloss over the original meaning of the term “role” from TTRPGs and D&D (a performative role), which is the source for “RPG” in MMORPG and CRPG, even though in MMOs it ends up carrying out different work (functional and social). In MMOs the role of Dungeon Master is not present. The original use of the term role in TTRPGs, the performative role, is so sidelined in MMOs that role-playing guilds and servers are usually distinguished as such, and this is even considered a little nerdy for MMO players. Although we use the same term in both settings (TTRPGs, MMORPGs), “role” predominantly means different things, and the meanings are not comparable. I find the social opportunities available to (or forced on) players in MMOs fascinating, but unproblematically using “role” to mean “fantasy setting” (and this later morphed into the general concept of “an adventure game”) and to ignore the more grounded meanings of the term is annoying and can leave the work incomplete.
