I was a healer, a damned good one but as this was the opening round of this, supposedly, epic battle I had yet to use my healing on anyone.
No. But you were geared towards being a healer. Not the monstrosity a cleric can be if you go all out.
Oh, I always though magic-guy WAS a role, because merlin was one. My bad. I guess knight-guy isn't a role either.. silly arthur and your knights.[/sarcasm]
Merlin was a wizard. One who in most myths actually cast very few spells. And as all the Knights of the Round Table were knights, calling them 'knight guy' is functionally useless. Roles aren't about who someone is but what they bring to the group.
I didn't say that roles weren't meant to be a catchall. I merely said that in 3e the "roles" were along the lines of the concept of the character, like "magic-guy", as opposed to by build concept, like "I want to do X power because it is cool", things like that.
And that isn't a role. It isn't even close to a role. It's too broad. A pure focussed specialist in Evocation who only ever takes Evocation direct damage spells is performing a completely different role from a specialist diviner who specialises in scrying, information, and transportation. The role is what you do for the party - how you do it is more or less irrelevant.
Why is skill-guy a trap? I am currently running a PF game where the players ADORE using their skills. They use them for everything they can.
What level are you at? The reason it's a trap is because so many skills are made simply irrelevant by magic at higher levels.
They roll a d20 while performing any action, expecting I tell them which skill they just used. The fighter and wizard in that game are often disappointed that the rogue gets so many.
The fighter class leaves a lot to be desired.
It seems odd in 4e if a fighter wants to use a bow but in 3e it was common place, that is my issue.
And? The classes aren't quite the same as they used to be. And no edition has kept the classes all the same. The 4e fighter is doing the dominant role of the fighter from any edition.
My point here was that everything associated with non-combat had the axe put to it in 4e.
This is a complete and utter fabrication. What had the axe put to it was
downtime mechanics. (And annoying skills that actively subtract from assumed competence, like Use Rope).
The 4e rogue has more competence, more flexibilty, and more out of combat ability than the 3e rogue. This is because the 4e rogue not only gets decently trained skills (and effectively more of them - 6 out of 17 skills beats 8+Int out of 36), he gets utility powers allowing him to excel at skills in a way the 3e rogue can't.
In 3e there were rules for EVERYTHING. Some people call this bloat, and it certainly was, but it was reassuring that I could find the rule somewhere if I wanted to go looking.
And I found it aggravating. To me it matters more that I can make a good call and keep the game flowing than that there are 250 separate rules I feel pressured to memorise and possibly even look up at the table. I find too detailed mechanics pressurising rather than reassuring.
The fact that things like social skills were all but removed from 4e struck a resounding blow that it would focus on combat.
Social skills?
3.X has Bluff, Diplomacy, Sense Motive, Gather Information, and Disguise.
4e has Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight, and Streetwise - with Disguise explicitly being a subset of the Bluff skill.
A grand total of
one social skill has been removed from 4e - and that has
explicitely been wrapped up under another skill. Two have changed name but remained.
What's gone are things like the
hard coded diplomacy god mode rules. That said, I wish they had kept the five point scale for diplomacy.
It may have touched on other areas but the book made it very clear that it was dealing with the combat "pillar" as opposed to "exploration" and "interaction".
The interaction pillar is about as well supported in 4e as in 3.X. And doesn't have magical support trampling all over it. Exploration? There you have a point - 4e really needs a Wilderness Survival Guide. And possibly an urban one.
And Neonchameleon is flat out wrong.
This from someone claiming Monkey Grip is a good feat.
The fighter is more than capable of doing his job with his own abilities.
I've been through this on another thread. Fifteenth level PF fighter versus d3+1 summonable Celestial (or Fiendish) Dire Tigers, d4+2 Celestial (or Fiendish) Anklyosauri, or d4+2 Bralani Azata. Which would you prefer on your side in combat? The fighter, or your choice of the others?
Because that's a 15th level fighter vs one standard action from an Eidolon-less 13th level summoner.
In all seriousness, please don't spread around false ideas that it's a sin to accept buffs from other players for fear of being called a weakling class because you supposedly can't do your job with your own abilities. That's what buffs are for.
It isn't a sin to accept buffs. That's what buffs are for. It is, however, false accounting to allocate the effectiveness from buffs to the buffee rather than the buffer. As for can't do your job with your own abilities,
that is the problem.
@
Herschel and @
Neonchameleon :
It is the formatting and presentation of roles throughout the class chapters that causes that problem, not an insufficient explanation of the roles themselves.
Ah, OK. I defend many things about 4e - but the presentation in the PHB isn't one of them.
[quote[The responses of "OMG Eldritch, you don't know anything about 4e!" are uncalled for, because I'm talking about why people I've talked to have dropped for 4e based on roles, not making any claims as to those perceptions being correct at all.[/quote]
OK
And I think we can agree that the presentation of the PHB sucks. It plays much better than it reads.
No, I know my AD&D just fine, thank you. When I say "do fancy stuff with different weapons," I mean exactly that, that one fighter uses bows and another uses S&B and another uses two-handers and so on. Y'know, the same kind of weapon style stuff I've been talking about.
And with the exception of bows, so do 4e characters
First of all, saying I can't reference UA and the Complete Barbarian's Handbook after complaining that I wasn't referencing 4e splats is a bit unfair, don't you think?
Absolutely not. I think it's pure consistency. You are saying what didn't show up in the 4e PHB. And I'm saying that needs comparing with equivalent PHBs. If you want to reference UA and the Complete Barbarian's Handbook then for consistency you should reference 4e splats. If you want to reference just the PHB then you should reference just the PHB.
Barbarians have always been tough and offensively-oriented, rage was only one manifestation of that.
The single most defining attribute of the UA Barbarian was
hatred of magic. Hatred of magic made it different from any other class in the game. And they were explicitely granted a large amount of power to make up for not wanting to be near magic including magic items. The most defining attribute for a 3.X barbarian was
rage. And if you want to talk about "flip out and kill things" without rage then the fighter does likewise.
A completely naked 20th-level cleric can still contribute just fine, even if their DCs are suffering, they have fewer spells, etc., whereas a completely naked 20th-level fighter or monk can't compete with relevant threats without items or buffs.
No it isn't. The problem is that outside combat the 20th level fighter's abilities are almost entirely irrelevant. Inside combat with high level spells flying around he's still a man waving a pointy piece of metal - and in the fighter's case with a will defence that sucks. And a cleric who can be bothered can outfight the fighter.
That has unfortunately meant that many forum-goers who are used to correcting those people tend to extrapolate from "fighter types need items to compete, and clerics can outfight fighters if they try" (which is true) to "fighter types can't compete, and individual fighters can't be better at combat than individual clerics" (which is not).
I don't know why people are trying to say that anyone thinks that individual fighters can't be better at combat than individual clerics. Hogtie the fighter and the wizard's better at combat than the fighter. If the cleric doesn't care about being good at melee, the fighter will outfight the cleric - because the cleric has better things to do (see Ars Magica).
