D&D 5E How would you like 5e to handle combat roles.

[Lanefan]

But seriously: it is possible to play a campaign that is extremely light on elements of adventure and danger in D&D, but there is no edition that makes this a particularly good choice.

One could make a pretty good argument that 2e could easily handle a near-zero-combat political intrigue campaign in any of its settings but particularly in Birthright.

But if the idea that D&D should make it easy to develop characters who are good at what typically happens in a D&D adventure is strange to folks, I have to wonder if this isn't arguing for the sake of a hypothetical point that really doesn't occur.

I think you're missing the point a bit. Nobody is saying that designing decent characters should be difficult, at least from what I've seen. But - and it's a big but - it should be *possible* to design (or get handed by your dice) a weak character if that's what you really want...and from what I can tell 4e made this a tough task.

Are you going to play through Against the Giants, the Caves of Chaos, the Temple of Elemental Evil with a character who doesn't have anything to do in combat? Really?

I've seen it attempted - not with those specific adventures, mind you, but I once saw a player in a 1e game try to play a truly pacifist Cleric. The DM supported it by giving it ExP for when it avoided combat or prevented bloodshed; the character lasted two or theee adventures before something killed it, and the concept worked out OK except the rest of the players were a bloodthirsty lot who liked to roll dice.

And should the game really support that kind of play? Really?

Why not? If they follow through on this three-pillars idea it should in theory be possible to play mostly if not entirely inside the two pillars that are not combat.

Lan-"pacifist D&D isn't my cup of tea but that's no reason not to support it"-efan

 

[Khaalis]

Quote: }And should the game really support that kind of play? Really?"

Why not? If they follow through on this three-pillars idea it should in theory be possible to play mostly if not entirely inside the two pillars that are not combat

^ This! I'm sorry but IMHO, D&D has always been and should always be a ROLEPLAYING Game first and foremost. It is not Battletech, HeroClix or a tabletop MMO. There is more to D&D than dungeon crawling and killing stuff. That isn't to say that some combat isn't an eventuality in typical fantasy "adventuring" but the entire system shouldn't be based 90% on just combat.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But, not entirely unreasonable. There are a large number of times when someone says, "But, 4e is like this..." and there is clear, concise evidence that that isn't true. Not only isn't it true, but, it wasn't even true when the game was first released.

But, critics still bring these things up. Why is the criticism automatically believed when the actual text of the game is not?

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It is about assuming good faith, not jumping to conclusions and staying on point. This is a forum, there are people on both sides who make incorrect statements or make claims about editions they have little experience with. You dont see me accusing anyone of not having played 1E, 2E or 3E, just because I sense an innacuracy in thir argument.

Look, there are a number of reasons these things come up. Sometimes people are incorrect or overstate despite having played the edition; sometimes they dont remember correctly, sometimes experiences genuinely differ (as seems to be the case with the whole casting failure debate you are having), and yes sometimes folks make uninformed statements. But the whole, "i don't think you have ever played 4E" thing has become a rhetorical cudgel. It is usually at best a wild assumption and it poisons the dialogue for those of us who have played it and just have a different opinion than 4E fans. Keep in mind just because someone says "i dont like how 4E doesn't let me do X" and you offer a solution that doesn't mean the person was lying or didn't play. Nor does it mean your solution is satisfactory. We alo know the ranger solution for the two weapon fighter for instance, but not everyone accepts it as a good way to handle the issue. And many solutions offered still dont get around the chef complaints.

 

[Danzauker]

One could make a pretty good argument that 2e could easily handle a near-zero-combat political intrigue campaign in any of its settings but particularly in Birthright.

This I don't get.

I've been playing lots of political / intrigue / diplomacy / no-combat adventures through my decade old RPG career. With different GMs and different systems.

One thing that's ABSOLUTELY true is that NOBODY can take out roleplaying from RPGs. Doesn't matter if it's 1E, 3.xE, 4.E, Vampire or Chtulhu. If the players and DM agree to engage an encounter with pure roleplay, do dice rolled, nobody will stop them.

So, I really don't get this. The only thing 4E had that previous editions didn't is a formalized rule subset for handling non combat encounters, the infamous skill challenges.

But still, NOBODY forced you to use it. The old DM golden rule of "if you convince the guard that you can pass then you can" is still valid if that's your game style.

 

[Andor]

So we are back to discussing how easy it is to make a character who is not effective in one of the core elements of D&D?

I can't speak for anyone else, but no. That's not whay I'm saying, this is:

Roles are the central driving focus of class design in 4e.

4e has many elements of class design that I do not like.

I do not like powers so gamist and abstract that I cannot imagine how they could conceiveably work. I'm not talking about magic btw.

I do not like niche protection.

I do not like making everyone, including the basket weaver, into a Vancian character.

I do not like the universal complexity that demands every class be played by someone with systems mastery equivilent to a 3e spell caster. I didn't play many casters in 3e, because I cannot, at my age, be bothered reading through thousands of spell descriptions. YMMV.

I do not like the inflexible siloing of 4e class design structure.

I'm told that some of these things were fixed (Or broken, apparently) late in 4es life. I wouldn't know, I only have the base three books.

I'm glad to hear they finally acknowledged and tried to fix things towards the end. The same thing happend towards the end of 3e, and it was some of the best stuff written for the system like the Bo9S as they started to explore the design space for 4e.

But from these things I conclude that 4e style explicit roles carry a lot of very negative baggage, and they do it for a benefit which I think is fairly minimal.

Since even the most ardent of 4e style role supporters seem to be telling me that they failed utterly in their job of allowing WotC to control what happened on other peoples tables I'll ask again: Why should explicit roles exist in 5e?

 

[Neonchameleon]

One could make a pretty good argument that 2e could easily handle a near-zero-combat political intrigue campaign in any of its settings but particularly in Birthright.

Well yes. But it does it by largely freeforming. Almost any system can do that - but it does it despite the system not helped by it.

I think you're missing the point a bit. Nobody is saying that designing decent characters should be difficult, at least from what I've seen. But - and it's a big but - it should be *possible* to design (or get handed by your dice) a weak character if that's what you really want...and from what I can tell 4e made this a tough task.

Actually it's very easy in 4e. Take a fighter, make his dump stat strength. Or a wizard and intelligence - or any other class dumping their primary stat (except the Lazy Warlord, but I digress). For bonus points give the fighter no armour and a weapon he isn't proficient with. Voila. One incredibly weak character.

What isn't possible (at least not by any route I can think of) is to create a seriously weak character through naively taking what looks like good choices. If you write "fighter" on your character sheet, make your highest stat strength, give him decent armour and a martial weapon, and powers and feats that fit your concept then you will end up with a decently strong character who will shine at what he was built for. There are no 1e (or 3e) monks.

Lan-"pacifist D&D isn't my cup of tea but that's no reason not to support it"-efan

There's even a 4e feat called "pacifist healer" - and a whole list of powers for clerics that do precisely no damage. It's not very well supported but the support is there, even giving things to do in combat.

But

Sorry, should have proofread better. I'll deal with what I was replying to below.

But you are disproving strawmen.

Charactes in 4e are designed to all shine in combat. This is something most wouldn't argue with. In fact, fans consider that a strength. The balance in 4e is designed around the combat encounter. This is also something peolle pretty widely accept. My statement was essentoally that this is the wrong way to design classes, and why the 4e roles dont work for me. I am sure it is possible to gimp a character in 4e, i never said it wasn't

Characters in 4e are designed to be good at combat. But that doesn't mean that all their focus is there.

In the case in question, my bard has five feats and two utility powers. Of these a grand total of one is for combat. He's useful in combat and brings our ability to heal. But it's not where he really shines. On the other hand, I think our knight and our slayer each have one non-combat feat. The rest are pure combat. Also their classes are directly about being good at combat rather than helping others bring it.

So my character isn't even slightly gimped. He just does about half the damage of our slayer, and about a third less than our knight. This is because I have a class with a broad non-combat focus and have chosen to focus on things other than combat.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nonchameleon, i will have to take your word on the bard, as I only have the first phb and dmg (another issue i had with 4e was the expectation people buy 3 phbs). But what you are describing still doesn't sound like what I am after. If that class works out for you, great. But my experience making characters with the first PhB, and with the others when I went back and tried to play again last year is the roles totally ruin the game for me. There may be exceptions, like the bard,as you point out, and they may have changed their approach over time, but the classes were very carefully balanced around combat encounters in 4e, rather than against other elements or over the course of the campaign. This is something 4e defenders hold up as a good design model, something they said explicitly they were doing, etc. So either they didn't do what they set out to do with roles, or they changed how they were used over time. Either way, i dont see what roles bring to the table in that case.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I do not like powers so gamist and abstract that I cannot imagine how they could conceiveably work. I'm not talking about magic btw.

Other than the continually debated Come and Get It, I'd appreciate you naming some. Because I have never had this problem. (I've seen monster power instances where I wanted to throw the rulebook at the designers - there's a bad one in Neverwinter - but not for PC powers).

I do not like niche protection.

As I've demonstrated, a fighter is much better at stepping on a rogue's toes in 4e than they are in 3e. There is acutally very little niche protection in 4e - what there is is niche support. Every class gets bonusses to perform in thier niche. You seem to be assuming that people get penalties to other niches - which is a different matter.

You can be good at just about whatever you want to with a 4e character and a little work. But to be truly outstanding you normally have to focus your class.

I do not like making everyone, including the basket weaver, into a Vancian character.

Play Essentials and pick a martial type. *shrug*

I do not like the universal complexity that demands every class be played by someone with systems mastery equivilent to a 3e spell caster. I didn't play many casters in 3e, because I cannot, at my age, be bothered reading through thousands of spell descriptions. YMMV.

Good. Because you don't need to do this in 4e. There is no equivalent to spell prep. You simply pick your powers once per level with the book open in front of you. And picking on names and very basic fluff works.

And you're working without the Essentials classes. Which do have much simpler classes - I cheered for the slayer even though I have no wish at all to play one because it was a very simple class.

I'm told that some of these things were fixed (Or broken, apparently) late in 4es life. I wouldn't know, I only have the base three books.

You mean after two years. The PHB was published in June 2008 Heroes of the Forgotten Lands was published in November 2010. That's less time than it took the 3.5 PHB to come out.

But from these things I conclude that 4e style explicit roles carry a lot of very negative baggage, and they do it for a benefit which I think is fairly minimal.

They might for you. But as I have demonstrated, almost every claim you have made about the impact of the 4e roles is simply not true.

Since even the most ardent of 4e style role supporters seem to be telling me that they failed utterly in their job of allowing WotC to control what happened on other peoples tables I'll ask again: Why should explicit roles exist in 5e?

The roles succeeded. You simply are ascribing a motivation to them that isn't there.

The roles do two things.

1: Keep the game designers focussed. If you know you are designing a striker you end up with someone who does extra damage somehow. You don't end up with a turkey of a class like the 3.X monk, the jack of no trades. And you don't end up with a class like the 3.X Druid who can out-fight the fighter (as can his pet), heal extremely well (once SNA summons unicorns you can challenge the cleric for best healer), and do area of effect damage like a wizard.

2: Tell new players what they are getting themselves in for. If you naively build a fighter you will be a defender with a secondary role of striker. If you naively build a warlord you will be a leader and part time meat shield. It's a good way for players who don't know what they want to play to narrow down over two dozen classes to one more likely to fit what they want.

It's a guideline not a straightjacket. You are arguing against the roles doing a job that I see no evidence to show exists.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Guys I dont think rehashing these old edition war debates is getting us any where. At this stage it is an endless back and forth. Bottom line, some people like powers and roles, some people dont. The designers of 5e are going to have to figure out a way to get both groups to the table.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Bottom line, some people like powers and roles, some people dont.

It's fine to not like something... just be very careful about ascribing things to them that can be proven demonstrably false just in an effort to strengthen your point. It's very easy to do, but weakens your argument when its shown to not be 100% correct. And we're all guilty of it occasionally.