The danger of the Three Pillars of D&D

[BobTheNob]

Utterly disagree.

What does a fighter do...he fights! What does a rogue do : all that handy "adventuring" stuff.

The more you try to blur this (fighters highly skillful outside of the fight, rogues really good in a fight) the more the game moves to the very thing which made 4e loose its shine for me. Our party basically ended up as six mages!!! They werent, their fluff was different, but when it came time for a fight, they all basically made the same contribution with minor variations. The power system, designed to enable balance, just created no division.

This is why Im delighted that the designers are looking back in time. To when we werent trying to make everyone capable of everything. When classes had clear ideas of what they did and their role (and no, Im NOT talking "combat" roles, which are just a statement in "this is an mmo/wargame, not an rpg"). Where characters were different and a player could learn to love it for being so, rather than being in a constant arms race with the guy next to him.

You have to go back a fair ways to find that charm (pre 3e min) but it was there. Im hoping they can re-find it, and figure out how to take the tactical elegance of the later editions and marry them with the unbalanced charm of the early days.

I hope they can pull it off, because if 5e is as technically correct as 4e was (I consider 4e the finest edition in terms of rules eloquence) there is no chance our group will play it (and we played 4e for 2+ years).

 

[Transformer]

Shouldn't it be the player's choice, though?

I'm with this guy, at least on a very abstract level. I want a system where I can choose to be good at or suck at any of the three pillars, in any combination. I can be a fighter who fights and tracks but sucks in social encounters. I'll be good at both, but not as good as a pure combat fighter, or pure exploration ranger or rogue. I could play a wizard with some combat spells, some utility spells, and some resources invested in social skills and a social theme. I'm proficient at all 3 pillars, but not as good at any one of them as somone who specialized in only one or two.

A few problems immediately present themselves:

1. It would be nice if--as a pure fighting fighter--even if I'm no good outside of combat, I still have something to do when the group isn't engaged in combat. I want to be able to support others, make auxiliary search checks, maybe have one applicable social skill (intimidation).

2. We don't want to trap noobs in characters that are more limited than they wanted. The rulebooks need to make it clear, if you're building a fighter who sucks at everything but fighting, that you will suck at most everything but fighting. We also don't want any clearly inferior options, be they skills, themes, or whatever. Perfect balance is impossible, of course, and no one's denying it, but Wizards needs to at least have a go at making everything reasonably equitable and useful. No trap options that are obviously trap options to the designers and to experienced players but that screw over noobs.

Anyway, this is awfully abstract. But it's my ideal theorycraft framework.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Wow, strangely devisive issue. Another angle:

3 'pillars' or not, not every campaign will rest equally on each one, nor do so consistently. A game concieved as bysantine political intrigue will be different than one concieved as a series of battles and manuevers in wartime. The one might lead to the other, too, even the DM might not know for sure when the campaigns starts how it will end up being distributed over those 3 broad categories of adventuring - not unless he plans on a fair bit of railroading, anyway.

In light of that, 'balancing' classes across those pillars rather than on each individually, will fail to remain balanced from campaign to campaign. If the fighter is a combat-heavy character and sucks at exploration, and the game becomes an extended exercisse in spelunking with little combat, the fighter radically underperforms. (Probably a bad example, since a fighter can at least climb ropes, and has even weaker areas, but whatever). If a campaign is to be free to develop, and players free to choose the concepts they like, then it can't rest class balance on having some roughly-equal proportion of different types of adventuring.

So, yes, each class should contribute in each of the three pillars, albeit, in very different ways. Inevitably, one character may shine a bit brighter in one situation than another, that's not something that needs to be built in, nor that could be prevented entirely, even if you made each character mechanically absolutely identical (player decisions still matter, afterall).

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

That doesn't make my argument a strawman. A strawman argument is a deliberately weak, insincere argument posited just for the purpose of knocking it down. Since I actually do think that's less than satisfying, it's kind of impossible for it to be a strawman.

But to your broader point, it's true, they can contribute in different ways.

However, that is still less than satisfying, for a few reasons. The one I want to talk about now involves dragging in a separate area of class design methodology: character archetype.

Any robust character archetype involves strengths and weaknesses inherent in the concept. For example, your typical "Dumb Muscle" character is very strong, but not so smart. Your typical "antihero" character is quite efficient, but not so likable. Your typical "Dapper Assassin" character is best when he only has to lift a finger if it results in someone getting a poisoned dart in the neck. One of my current characters is a gnome artificer who is great with machines, but who can't figure out people. I deliberately didn't invest a THING into her social skills, and it's great fun when I am forced into a social situation with her.

To not be able to model those weaknesses -- to be unable to make them "fun failures" -- would be a problem for a system.

So, weaknesses are desirable, from a character-building standpoint.

The challenge, from a game-design standpoint, is to make the weakness notable, without unintentionally crippling a character.

Which is why you assure some sort of basic level of competency -- nothing is an Always Fail or Always Succeed situation for a character.

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.

Sure. But what use should a druid be in an urban intrigue campaign? Personally, I'd prefer if a DM just told me right out: "This is going to be an urban intrigue campaign, don't bother to roll a druid or a ranger or a barbarian, because they will suck at what this campaign is about," rather than somehow forcing the DM to shoehorn barbarians and druids into his urban intrigue campaign, and giving druids and barbarians useful urban intrigue skills that make little to no sense as their character archetypes are really NOT in that vein.

In other words, not every character archetype is or should be valid in every kind of campaign. Though I'd prefer the "default" game should be big enough to have moments of exploration, roleplaying, and combat, I want each class to hit some minimum competency in all those areas, and I want the game to be clear about what each class is good at and what it is not so good at, DMs should also be able to take their games in one direction, featuring one or the other more prominently. And players should, too -- a DM who didn't put any limits in before character generation, and whose players all pick combat-heavy classes would be remiss if they didn't include a bunch of combat stuff for those characters to do.

I think it's pretty unsatisfying to force everyone to be equally competent at all areas of every kind of challenge.

 

[pemerton]

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.

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.

I agree with Spatula. Meaningful character distinction can rest on the manner of contribution - both its mechanical nature (eg ranged vs non-ranged attacks) and it's fictional/story nature (eg shooting arrows vs summoning spirits of the dead).

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.

Provided that "better" in the second clause means "better for the purposes of realising my PC", then I agree. But this is orthogonal to the issue of whether each PC is competent in a range of typical adventuring contexts. If (for exampe) one PC is good at wooing maidens, and another at scaring them, then we have a situation in which choices mater, and produce meaningfully different PCs, although both may be equally able to have an impact on social situations.

A bit of speculation: both KM and Ahnehnois seems to be equating "equally able to contribute" with "equally likely to win", as if "winning" had some predetermined value. I want a game where what counts as "winning" is determined by the players, not the GM, and is worked out in the course of play; and where all the players are, via their PCs, able to have a meaningful impact on any given situation.

Consider the PC who can woo maidens, and the PC who can scare them. It's not the case that both of these PCs are equally good at "winning" - if the first is wanting to woo the maiden, then the scary one is likely (everything else being equal) to be an obstacle to that goal. The point is that both are able to make a meaningful difference in an encounter with maidens. Which is what I want out of an RPG.

 

[pemerton]

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.

It's hard to know without having been there, but that sounds like either (i) poor encounter design by the GM, or (ii) poor adjudication by the GM. What was the king (played by the GM, presumably) saying to the fighter PC such that the fighter responded by doing backflips? And if doing backflips is an absurd thing to do in the situation, then how is it contributing a success to the skill challenge?

If the other players think it is important for the fighter PC to be part of the scene, then they need to be doing their bit to set up a situation in which the fighter's physical prowess can plausibly make a contribution. Or the GM should frame the encounter in that way in the first place.

 

[Mercule]

The more you try to blur this (fighters highly skillful outside of the fight, rogues really good in a fight) the more the game moves to the very thing which made 4e loose its shine for me. Our party basically ended up as six mages!!! They werent, their fluff was different, but when it came time for a fight, they all basically made the same contribution with minor variations. The power system, designed to enable balance, just created no division.

Agreed. When they introduced the feats in PHB2 (I think) that let you use pretty much whatever stat you wanted for your normal attacks, I knew the game was going off course (by my definition).

Rogue is my favorite class. I'm actually pretty okay with the rogue not being as awesome as the fighter, in combat. It also doesn't bother me if the wizard spends more rounds looking for his golden opportunity than he does actually nuking stuff. That's part of what drives the feel of each of the classes. It's also what balances them.

Take the wizard, for example. The classic vision of the wizard (at least to me) has been the guy who just blows everything to kingdom come, when he decides it's time to act. If the wizard has round-to-round output that's reasonably close to the fighter's, then allowing them to have nukes totally unbalances the wizard. The key to the balance is in the lack of equality. Include limited spells for the wizard and you get them behaving like Merlin or Gandalf, who were both much more contemplative and selective about when they used magic.

Additionally, having the spotlight when the party could have made it through without you is a bit uninspiring. There should be a lot more to differentiate the fighter and the rogue than the fighter getting a high-damage attack from using a big weapon and a rogue getting high-damage from a preponderance of well-placed strikes.

And that's just combat. When you include the rogue's ability to climb like a monkey, steal stuff, and just plain dazzle with non-magical tricks, who really cares if the fighter gets to showboat in combat?

 

[Ahnehnois]

A bit of speculation: both KM and Ahnehnois seems to be equating "equally able to contribute" with "equally likely to win", as if "winning" had some predetermined value. I want a game where what counts as "winning" is determined by the players, not the GM, and is worked out in the course of play; and where all the players are, via their PCs, able to have a meaningful impact on any given situation.

I agree that D&D isn't a game that is "won" in the normal sense. and I share the related sentiment.

The idea I'm getting at is the "gladiator theory". Some people seem to expect that if I take any two PCs created using similar parameters (level, ability scores, items), and have them fight to the death in a controlled environment, every PC should have a 50% chance of defeating every other PC. I, OTOH, expect that the average fighter would beat the average rogue in that situation more often than not, because he is a fighter. I don't advocate that this ridiculous setup is the way the game is played or the way it should be balanced, so I'm trying to countermand that notion.

Thus, I want to play a game where I can choose what I want my character to be good at and focus on that, without the expectation that my character will necessarily be good at things I do not choose to focus on.

 

[pemerton]

Any robust character archetype involves strengths and weaknesses inherent in the concept.

<snip>

Your typical "antihero" character is quite efficient, but not so likable.

But the non-likeability of the antihero has an impact on social situations. It's a mode of contribution.

your typical "Dumb Muscle" character is very strong, but not so smart.

<snip>

Your typical "Dapper Assassin" character is best when he only has to lift a finger if it results in someone getting a poisoned dart in the neck. One of my current characters is a gnome artificer who is great with machines, but who can't figure out people. I deliberately didn't invest a THING into her social skills, and it's great fun when I am forced into a social situation with her.

I don't want to pass judgement on your gnome PC, but neither the dapper assassin nor the dumb muscle strikes me as ideal PCs for an RPG based on the so-called 3 pillars. If the dapper assassin is in a melee, something has gone wrong. If the dumb muscle is trying to make friends at the ball, likewise something has gone wrong. (In fiction, the dumb muscle generally would be a sidekick or a hencman.)

To not be able to model those weaknesses -- to be unable to make them "fun failures" -- would be a problem for a system.

So, weaknesses are desirable, from a character-building standpoint.

The challenge, from a game-design standpoint, is to make the weakness notable, without unintentionally crippling a character.

One approach - which has some merits, and is underexplored - is the lazy warlord from 4e. Another approach - which has been explored extensively, but only in the context of one archetype (the wizard) and has some issues but probably not insoluble ones - is the magical summoner. A third approach, which has also been explored but probably inadequately in the context of a contemporary D&D game, is the sidekick/henchman (eg why can't the dapper assassin have the dumb muscle take part in combat for him?).

But what use should a druid be in an urban intrigue campaign? Personally, I'd prefer if a DM just told me right out: "This is going to be an urban intrigue campaign, don't bother to roll a druid or a ranger or a barbarian, because they will suck at what this campaign is about,"

Well, here's where we discover (once again) that D&D, played straight out of the rulebooks, is not a generic fantasy system. If three out of ten core classes are about wilderness exploration, the game is going to have to be tweaked or drifted in some way to support urban intrigue. This isn't an issue for class design or the three pillars (a ranger, barbarian or druid can be as strong as you like in each pillar and still suck for an urban intrigue campagin). As you say, it's about setting the parameters at the start of a campaign.

 

[I'm A Banana]

A bit of speculation: both KM and Ahnehnois seems to be equating "equally able to contribute" with "equally likely to win", as if "winning" had some predetermined value.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "winning." Mostly, I'm talking about an equal mathematical ability to be successful at a given task. There are character types that SHOULD fail (in an entertaining way) more often than not when attempting challenges involved in role-playing or exploring or direct combat. In d20 vs. DC terms, they should have a lower bonus (or even a slight penalty at low levels).

I want a game where what counts as "winning" is determined by the players, not the GM, and is worked out in the course of play; and where all the players are, via their PCs, able to have a meaningful impact on any given situation.

I think this would call for a classless game -- one where you determined your character's progression through play rather than via a choice at character creation. Thus, your strengths and weaknesses emerge organically.

Consider the PC who can woo maidens, and the PC who can scare them. It's not the case that both of these PCs are equally good at "winning" - if the first is wanting to woo the maiden, then the scary one is likely (everything else being equal) to be an obstacle to that goal. The point is that both are able to make a meaningful difference in an encounter with maidens. Which is what I want out of an RPG

Successfully wooing a difficult maiden, or successfully scaring a brave maiden, isn't something that a character who isn't skilled at social interaction should be able to do as easily as a character who is skilled at social interaction. Controlling how NPC's view you is the main ability for those skilled at social interaction. And if it's not a challenge, they should just be able to do it pretty simply, without bothering to roll for it.