The danger of the Three Pillars of D&D

At the DDXP "class" seminar (transcript here), Monte brought up the Three Pillars of D&D: Roleplay/Interaction, Combat, and Exploration. And the idea that classes would be balanced by their ability to interact with/excel at those three pillars.

I think this is a terrible idea.

It goes back to a post I made at the advent of 4th Edition (Roles in RPGs - EN World: Your Daily RPG Magazine). Essentially: my choice of how I participate during combat should not impact my ability to participate out of combat.

For example, the rogue. The rogue traditionally has fewer hit points and a worse attack bonus than the fighter. This is "balanced" by the rogue's more interesting and diverse skill selection.

Again: terrible idea.

I want to play a game where every class can contribute in every situation: combat, exploration, social interactions. Just because a character can wear armor and skillfully fight doesn't mean that he should be incapable of holding a conversation (3E and 4e fighter, I'm looking at you).

No. 5E should balance classes *within* each of those three pillars. And not try to balance strength in one pillar via a deficiency in another.

I disagree. If I can play Autolocus, King of Thieves and still fight like Xena, why would I want to play Xena? Well, other than my Lucy Lawless fantasies....

Because Xena can check for traps without using her feet all the time. It goes both ways.

A subtle distinction: The existence of the Three Pillars doesn't mean that you have to suck at two and rock at one (or even that you have to suck at one and rock at two, or even that you have to suck at any).

You can easily have a game where every character can contribute meaningfully in each area of the game.

However, the counterpoint to this is that if everyone is good at everything, there's no meaningful character distinction: Every mage can climb walls and every cleric has a fireball-equivalent and every fighter can interact as well as any paladin.

That's less than satisfying.

Like with anything, the best idea is usually somewhere in the middle. In this case, the answer is twofold. First, you give each character a sort of "minimum competency" in all three areas: Even idiot barbarians can Intimidate some critters, even if they don't invest much in it. They'll be able to do SOMETHING in a social encounter, even if it's the functional equivalent of a basic melee attack. On the A to F scale, every heroic character is at least a D.

You then provide meaningful distinction in how you raise that D to an A (or not).

The second prong is on the DM's side: you ensure that each adventure you design has all three pillars in it, as valid ways to overcome problems. You may lean more in one direction or another (some DMs may prefer combat, others might be more for the intrigue), but the three ways should all be present.

So, for instance, when dealing with the orcs attacking the town, you can go out and fight them, you can negotiate with their chieftain, or you can sneak into their camp and assassinate the chieftain in his sleep. Combat, roleplaying, and exploration.

Depending on your characters' builds, some ideas are better than others, and depending on the DM's design, some ideas might be better than others, but you leave the potential for all three ways to be potential solutions, and you leave the adventure open to whichever approach the party feels their characters are best at.

So, you give everyone a minimum competency, and then you present adventures in which the main conflict can be resolved using any of the three methods, and you don't have thieves struggling in a game that is all about combat, or fighters being gimped in a social game.

Another point to ameliorate this is easy respeccing, something like what 4e offers as a default: if you find your Thief struggling in a combat-heavy game, maybe you retrain and become an Assassin instead. If your Fighter is flustered by the social-heavy game, you maybe become a Knight instead. If your cleric isn't faring well in the Exploration-centric game, maybe you become a Druid instead. Or whatever.

It's not a universally horrible idea to trade one pillar for the other, you just need to sort of protect the game from binary results (Always Fails or Always Succeeds), and make sure that DMs include all three as valid playstyles (or are really clear about which ones they are excluding from their game -- a dungeon crawl game might not have room for much social interaction, so the DM might say "don't bother to play a bard or a paladin, they will suck at this.").

Kamikaze Midget said:

You can easily have a game where every character can contribute meaningfully in each area of the game.

However, the counterpoint to this is that if everyone is good at everything, there's no meaningful character distinction: Every mage can climb walls and every cleric has a fireball-equivalent and every fighter can interact as well as any paladin.

That's less than satisfying.

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Seems like a bit of a strawman to me. The three categories of play are sufficiently broad that everyone could be able to contribute without contributing in the same way.

Much like combat roles in 4e (the rogue and wizard are both useful in combat, but in different ways), each class could have some core competency in both social and exploration sessions. A druid or ranger would excel at dealing with outdoor situations, while a rogue would be better suited to trap-filled environments. But they all have the ability to utilize their class abilities in "exploration" play, which covers travel through both environments.

Roleplay should also occur during combat and exploration so I don't like seeing it grouped in with the "interaction" category. Hopefully this is just a naming short cut and not evidence of the belief that these things are truly orthogonal.

Zaruthustran said:

I want to play a game where every class can contribute in every situation: combat, exploration, social interactions.

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I don't. I want to play a game where my character choices matter, where some choices are better than others, and where different characters are meaningfully different from one another. I also want to play a game that does not assume that every character of adventuring quality is interested in or proficient at combat (in any way). Neither do I want it assumed that those three domains have the same character and the same relative importance in my game as they do in anyone else's.

Just because a character can wear armor and skillfully fight doesn't mean that he should be incapable of holding a conversation (3E and 4e fighter, I'm looking at you).

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This much is true. Class skills and similar restictions are a pain. If people want to play a charismatic fighter (or a sneaky one, or one who dabbles in alchemy in his spare time) this should be more feasible than it has generally been in D&D. Restrictions are bad.

No. 5E should balance classes *within* each of those three pillars. And not try to balance strength in one pillar via a deficiency in another.

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5e should try to make classes that describe interesting characters first, and think about balance second. Some characters should be good at some things, and others at other things, and balance should only refer to the ability of each character to be meaningfully good at something.

Where I agree everyone should be able to perform in any arena, bit it political or gladiatorial, I don't like the idea that every HAS to perform in every arena.

I'm going to go with an anecdote here, from my 4e game. It's a fairly casual beer and pretzels style game.

The party walks up to the King of the land, and starts up a conversation to help them on their quest to save the land from the evil magic doohickey. Standard stuff you know. We go into skill challenge mode and everyone does their thing: The paladin schmoozes, the wizard and the ranger give a detailed report on the threat, and then comes the Fighters turn. The Fighter decides this is a very important role to win, so he looks over his skill list to pick out the skills that would most likely pass a check.

He picks athletics, because that is what the character was good at. To win the king over, he decided to start doing backflips in as a display of his prowess. This, of course, totally breaks the mood and everyone bursts into laughter. It soon became the running gag of the campaign.

While this kind of situation could have been avoided if the character was good with social skills, but that wouldn't have fit the character. And in a more serious kind of game it wouldn't have cut the mustard at all. The fighter would have naturally preferred to let the "smooth-talkers" handle the situation, rather than delve into absurdity in order to help win the encounter, but the party really needed a solid success on the challenge at that point.

Shouldn't it be the player's choice, though? And if the system is flexible enough, I think it would be possible for the players to have characters that are as balanced or as specialized as they want.

At its crudest, I can see it working something like this: At first level, each character gets a handful of abilities distributed into the combat, roleplaying and exploration silos. Maybe a fighter gets 2/1/1, a bard gets 1/2/1 and a rogue gets 1/1/2. There is some scope for customization, so the player can choose two additional abilities from any silo. So, a first level fighter could start the game with 4/1/1, 3/2/1, 3/1/2, 2/3/1, 2/1/3, or 2/2/2 as he desires.

At every level, he gets to choose an additional ability. For most levels, he can choose from any silo, but maybe his choice gets restricted to specific silos at particular levels (say, fighters, bards and rogues must pick an ability from the combat, roleplaying and exploration silos respectively every three levels).

Such an approach allows for a wide variety of characters with different levels of generic competence and specialization, while ensuring that characters of specific classes retain a minimum level of ability in the areas they are supposed to be good at, and at least a very basic level of ability in every area.

Zaruthustran said:

I want to play a game where every class can contribute in every situation: combat, exploration, social interactions. Just because a character can wear armor and skillfully fight doesn't mean that he should be incapable of holding a conversation (3E and 4e fighter, I'm looking at you).

No. 5E should balance classes *within* each of those three pillars. And not try to balance strength in one pillar via a deficiency in another.

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And that way lies the road to homogeniety, with all its attendant boredom.

That said, it should really be up to the *player* how - and how well - their character(s) interact with others, be they other party members, NPCs, captured monsters, whatever. As long as it's kept vaguely in character (with Cha and Int scores in mind) a Fighter should be able to carry on a conversation just as well as a Wizard or a Thief.

They only need to balance combat and exploration, and even then it's not that big a deal if the balance isn't perfect.

Lan-"a Fighter that talks, sometimes way too much"-efan