Were the four roles correctly identified, or are there others?

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think this works in a game with melee strikers (or other roles). If a striker and defender are both within attack range. The optimal thing to do is attack the striker. The striker is both more dangerous and more fragile. Attacking a defender is simply a sub-optimal move. Thus the game requires extra mechanics to punish that choice.

Which it has - Combat Challenge in 4E, for example. I've seen this situation come up countless times in my 4E game, as we have a BRV Fighter and a Brutal Scoundrel Rogue - very often I could try and hit the Rogue, who, after the Fighter's -2 to the enemy is considered, is at the same AC as the Fighter (and higher NADs), but then guess what? the Fighter gets to use his Combat Challenge to hit my monster REALLY BLOODY HARD (because he's got a setup that is high-damage to start with and higher with Combat Challenge), so my monster gets to die even faster, and the Rogue just uses some sort of attack-avoidance or damage-reduction power if it's a big hit anyway!

That's not to say there aren't situations where the Rogue gets slapped silly - but it's usually when the Fighter is far away.

Look at how players approach a mixed group of monsters. They will gut the healer and mage first, and then move on to the rest.

Not if the Soldiers etc. make that a bad idea.

IThis is not true. Threat is actually a complication to induce better gameplay. The simplest, easiest method to do targeting for an AI is to attack the person doing the most damage, rather than the person doing the most threat. MMOs deliberately choose not to do this in order to create space for the Defender role.

It absolutely is true. Don't try and tell that to people who've been playing MMOs since there were MMOs, and tanking the whole time to boot. The tank role 9/10 MMOs is appalling artificial nonsense, though, quite different to 4E's actually-makes-sense Defenders.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

if you want to play a non combatant more often than not you aren't that interested in combat

That's a real problem in D&D. If you aren't interested in combat, you probably don't want to play D&D then. Because the math of D&D comes down to, as I've said above, lowering their hitpoints to 0 before they reduce yours to 0.

If you have 5 people in a party that need to do a total of 250 points of damage to defeat all the enemies and one of them doesn't want to participate in combat. You now suddenly have 4 people that need to do 250 damage. Now all your other party members need to do an extra 12.5 points of damage in the same amount of time to defeat their enemies. Most of the time, anything "non-combat" you are doing to help does not make up for that missing 50 points of damage.

We used to have a friend who played a Rogue/Wizard/Arcane Trickster in 3.5e who had this setup he'd do. He's turn invisible, he'd get into a proper position which was far away not to be hit and close enough to cast a 30 foot ranged spell and then he'd attack with an orb spell so he got sneak attack. He almost never did damage before the 3rd round of combat. Most of our combats ended in 2 rounds and he used to get super frustrated that his great idea was ruined because we'd beat the enemies too quickly. Then he managed to get off the combo one day and did something like 55 points of damage. We pointed out to him that he could have done 35 damage in round one by simply moving into a flanking position and attacking. Then he could have done another 35 the next round and then again the round after. Meaning, he could have done almost double his damage by not casting any spells at all.

This is the exact problem that comes up with most "non-combat" builds. They spend rounds doing pretty much nothing to contribute and it's better off having virtually anyone else in the party.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Which it has - Combat Challenge in 4E, for example. I've seen this situation come up countless times in my 4E game, as we have a BRV Fighter and a Brutal Scoundrel Rogue - very often I could try and hit the Rogue, who, after the Fighter's -2 to the enemy is considered, is at the same AC as the Fighter (and higher NADs), but then guess what? the Fighter gets to use his Combat Challenge to hit my monster REALLY BLOODY HARD (because he's got a setup that is high-damage to start with and higher with Combat Challenge), so my monster gets to die even faster, and the Rogue just uses some sort of attack-avoidance or damage-reduction power if it's a big hit anyway!

I've never really seen a fighter who hits "REALLY BLOODY HARD". The problem is the game is set up so that only those with bonus damage of some sort hit hard.

Most of the time this decision for enemies is: Do I hit the Fighter who has AC 32 or do I hit the Rogue who has AC 26? I get a -2 to hit the Rogue, but that still means he has AC 28. If I make the attack, the Fighter is going to have a 50% chance of hitting me for 1d8+7 points of damage. If I let the Rogue live, he is going to have a 65% chance to hit me for 5d6+15 points of damage. Better to take the damage from the Fighter.

 

[Aenghus]

We actually used to get rather angry at people for attempting to "control" in both 3.5e and 4e. Most of the time the controller did almost nothing because they'd put down an AOE that would prevent the enemies from acting and would also prevent all his allies from attacking the enemies. So we'd have to sit around and wait for an extra 3 rounds for the AOE to wear off before we could engage the enemy. When if we could have attacked, we would have just beat them.

The striker is the individualist role, they are typically single target and and don't need to work with others (though they can). The other roles require various amounts of teamwork for maximum effectiveness. The striker downside is their squishiness and need to maintain the initiative - strikers don't like being ambushed or outnumbered, and deal badly with minions. Once they start losing they find it hard to recover.

Controllers absolutely need teamwork and party cooperation so the control acts to benefits the party. They have lots of unfriendly area powers, which have always required discretion in use in every version of D&D, and I don't just mean not nuking the party. If the players refuse to coordinate, there wil be far less synergy, and synergy is a big force multiplier in 4e.

Divide and conquer. Controllers and defenders have a lot to do with the divide part of the equation, while strikers do the conquering.

Strangely enough, not everyone wants to play a striker-type PC, and again that's been true in every edition of D&D. The non-striker 4e classes are viable, and that's enough for me.

Now, the typical party absolutely benefits from a striker or three. "No striker" parties mean having to rejig hp down or the game gets very grindy. But strikers aren't universally better all the time.

 

[MoonSong]

That's a real problem in D&D. If you aren't interested in combat, you probably don't want to play D&D then. Because the math of D&D comes down to, as I've said above, lowering their hitpoints to 0 before they reduce yours to 0.

gee, Thanks for letting me know I've been doing it wrong all this time for the nth time already. Still I want to know how this relates to the point of non-lethal characters being disabled from existing.

This is the exact problem that comes up with most "non-combat" builds. They spend rounds doing pretty much nothing to contribute and it's better off having virtually anyone else in the party.

I'm still not convinced, and there are plenty of ways to tackle a dragon, you can buy him off, negotiate with it, befriend it, cheat him, evade him, why from all ways the only one-true way to deal with one has to be by pummeling it to death?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

gee, Thanks for letting me know I've been doing it wrong all this time for the nth time already. Still I want to know how this relates to the point of non-lethal characters being disabled from existing.

I don't think they were disabled for the same reason everyone else said. They were just made more useful. You don't have to take minuses, use special equipment or have a special build to be able to non-lethally fight someone. If the group wants to keep an enemy alive, they will be. If they choose not to, the person doing non-lethal isn't punishing the party.

It really isn't any different. In 3.5e, if someone was doing non-lethal it just meant we had to hit it another time or two with lethal damage to kill it. It was still possible for someone to accidentally kill the creature that had non-lethal on it. After all, if a creature had 50 hitpoints and had taken 35 lethal and 10 non-lethal, an attack for 15 lethal still killed the enemy.

I'm still not convinced, and there are plenty of ways to tackle a dragon, you can buy him off, negotiate with it, befriend it, cheat him, evade him, why from all ways the only one-true way to deal with one has to be by pummeling it to death?

Because 95% of the standard D&D plots exclude all those other ways.

Here's the average D&D scenario involving that dragon:

The PCs are asked to recover a powerful magic item hidden in a dragon hoard by the King. The dragon discovered the item recently and picked it up and brought it back to his lair. He loves the item and finds that it completes his collection completely. He will not give it up for anything. He is a dragon, he is extremely overconfident, capable of defeating almost anything to come into his lair and he knows it. He's also Chaotic Evil which means he loves causing chaos and suffering whenever possible. The more chaos and suffering he creates, the happier he is. If the PCs want the item, he'd tell them no just because it is more fun to see them suffer. The dragon hates intruders and loves his privacy. He loves killing because he loves the look on people's faces as they die and the sounds they make when they scream, being Chaotic Evil. He regularly makes trips to the nearby villages in order to capture and eat villagers to sate his hunger and there are bounties on his head from at least 5 different villages. The King is amongst these people and will offer a larger bounty than all the other villages if you bring back the dragon's head.

The item is in a magically locked chest in a secret chamber at the back of his cave since he valued it so much that he locked it up specially. His lair has wards on it that inform him when any creature enters it. It will even wake him from sleep. The wards detect even invisible creatures.

Now, if you have a DM who runs that as written, find me a group of adventurers where that DOESN'T end in combat. Half the party will want to kill the dragon simply because it is in the way and talking to it takes effort. The other half will want to kill it simply because they are good aligned and don't want the dragon taking any more lives. Even if you get the rare group who is extremely uncaring and yet diplomatic who want to talk to the dragon and don't care that it is slaughtering people....then you have the bounty on its head which means they might just do it for the money. Even if you get past all of that, the dragon isn't willing to negotiate or befriend them. It wants them out of his house and doesn't want them to come back. Or, more likely, it wants to kill them just to hear them scream. There might be a brief negotiation followed by the dragon trying to kill them.

Is it possible that there's a scenario where you sneak past or befriend a dragon? Sure. But it's likely if that scenario exists, it is because your DM planned for it to be a non-combat encounter all along. I've almost never seen a situation where a combat encounter was turned into a non-combat encounter. Most D&D combats are set up to be nearly unavoidable on purpose. You don't see Conan negotiating with the Evil Cultists about to summon their Ancient God for a reason.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I don't think this works in a game with melee strikers (or other roles). If a striker and defender are both within attack range. The optimal thing to do is attack the striker. The striker is both more dangerous and more fragile. Attacking a defender is simply a sub-optimal move. Thus the game requires extra mechanics to punish that choice.

Look at how players approach a mixed group of monsters. They will gut the healer and mage first, and then move on to the rest.

If a striker and a well built defender are both within attack range and you attack the striker the defender will gut you like a fish. Players approach a group of monsters trying to gut the healer and mage because monsters very seldom have Defenders. Although best practice for PCs approaching a group of monsters would be to freeze out the Defender (not kill - immobilise will work) then take the healer and mage, then everyone before the Defender. But if you can't freeze the defender out they become one of the top three targets, and sometimes the top one.

Worthwhile Defenders who are being ignored outdamage Strikers.

I don't think controller is well defined at all.
...
Here's the real deal, however. "Control" as it is defined in the game is literally just a way to prevent damage to your group.

This is partly true. The Controller's actual role is making the DM tear their hair out. Simple as that. If the DM isn't glaring at you at least every other encounter you aren't doing your job. It's a hard role to play well - you need to be able to seize opportunities and tell the DM's monsters straight up that they aren't doing what they think they are. Other than myself I know three other players IRL I would trust to play a controller that's more effective than a striker in the party would be, out of several dozen D&D players, and one of them would much rather make things go BOOM anyway.

The way a well played controller works is a Defeat in Detail. In a 4 vs 4 fight a Controller is doing their job properly if they can neutralise two of the enemy at the same time, turning the fight into 3 strikers vs 2 monsters followed by a second fight of 3 strikers vs 2 monsters. If they don't regularly create an overlap a striker would be more useful.

Leaders are panic buttons. Two leaders is always too many - and a well coordinated group can get by without one and only a multiclass feat or two (that said in a striker heavy party a Warlord shouldn't go amiss). A leader serves to blunt the enemy's focus fire.

And Defenders should be more dangerous than strikers unless the enemy does what the Defender wants.

My friends and I used to have this argument all the time in 3.5e, we had a couple people who were absolutely convinced that their character was super awesome because of all the defenses they had. Until we replaced them one day with someone who had no defenses and was all offense. We finished battles quicker and the entire party took less damage.

Textbook mistaken when building Defenders. Defenders should be built for Offence - they should just be tougher than the rest of the party. But a lot depends how obliging the DM is in targetting the Defender.

We actually used to get rather angry at people for attempting to "control" in both 3.5e and 4e. Most of the time the controller did almost nothing because they'd put down an AOE that would prevent the enemies from acting and would also prevent all his allies from attacking the enemies. So we'd have to sit around and wait for an extra 3 rounds for the AOE to wear off before we could engage the enemy. When if we could have attacked, we would have just beat them.

Now that's just bad tactics. The controller should prevent half the enemies from acting, leaving the other half of the enemies to fight the rest of the PCs without help. As I said, defeat in detail.

We used to have a friend who played a Rogue/Wizard/Arcane Trickster in 3.5e who had this setup he'd do. He's turn invisible, he'd get into a proper position which was far away not to be hit and close enough to cast a 30 foot ranged spell and then he'd attack with an orb spell so he got sneak attack. He almost never did damage before the 3rd round of combat. Most of our combats ended in 2 rounds and he used to get super frustrated that his great idea was ruined because we'd beat the enemies too quickly. Then he managed to get off the combo one day and did something like 55 points of damage. We pointed out to him that he could have done 35 damage in round one by simply moving into a flanking position and attacking. Then he could have done another 35 the next round and then again the round after. Meaning, he could have done almost double his damage by not casting any spells at all.

Gagh! Pet hate. And very bad tactics.

I've never really seen a fighter who hits "REALLY BLOODY HARD". The problem is the game is set up so that only those with bonus damage of some sort hit hard.

Most of the time this decision for enemies is: Do I hit the Fighter who has AC 32 or do I hit the Rogue who has AC 26? I get a -2 to hit the Rogue, but that still means he has AC 28. If I make the attack, the Fighter is going to have a 50% chance of hitting me for 1d8+7 points of damage. If I let the Rogue live, he is going to have a 65% chance to hit me for 5d6+15 points of damage. Better to take the damage from the Fighter.

On the other hand I've never seen that sort of gap in AC. And a Defender who's sunk that much into defence is probably doing the equivalent of your "Not hitting until round 3" Rogue/Arcane Trickster.

Let's look at it.

Rogue with AC 26. What level?

Assume a Rogue with Dex at level 1 of 18 and leather armour. AC 16. Fairly standard baseline for a Rogue.

At level 10, a Rogue should have +5 bonus to AC from level, +2 leather armour, and a further +1 from Dex. AC 24 if they have nothing beyond the baseline and are using inherent bonusses. Let's move them up to Level 12 (AC 25 now) and assume they've picked up one single extra bonus like +3 Armour, a Rhythm Blade in their offhand, that silly Mithral Chain Shirt from AV or something. Level 12 for AC26 is very easy.

So. What will a fighter be in at level 12?

AC 10. Half level = AC 16. +3 Scale -> AC 28. Large Shield = AC 30. This is the upper end of the equivalent of the AC 26 Rogue. This is where the fighter should stop unless they are alongside a collection of remarkably tough defenders. Adding more defence after this point is simply gilding the lily to the detriment of the fighter's ability to defend. And getting extra AC after +3 Scale and a Large Shield is actually pretty hard work. (Of course if the fighter is having to defend Strikers like the Avenger that can look after themselves more AC is more justifiable).

As for how hard the fighter hits, strikers add +1d6 damage/tier. The rest of it is all on power choice. Fighters get +1 to hit (which is worth a significant amount on its own) and have some very high damage powers (e.g. Rain of Steel). Your fighters unless they are actually getting pounded should be going flat out for damaging powers and feats.

gee, Thanks for letting me know I've been doing it wrong all this time for the nth time already. Still I want to know how this relates to the point of non-lethal characters being disabled from existing.

It doesn't. That's a crock. I don't like non-lethal characters, but there are a number of ways to do them in 4e. Including being the one who takes the enemies down and declaring you always knock them out. Or playing a pacifist cleric - or an intimidatomancer.

I'm still not convinced, and there are plenty of ways to tackle a dragon, you can buy him off, negotiate with it, befriend it, cheat him, evade him, why from all ways the only one-true way to deal with one has to be by pummeling it to death?

The problem is that combat is an all hands to the pumps situation. It's a matter of immediate life and death. If you are not contributing in combat you are the equivalent of someone on a sinking cruise liner who is sitting in your cabin because helping is not in your job description when the entire ship looks as if it is about to sink and drown the lot of you. Yes, on a ship you can be the Captain, a navigator, an engineer, an entertainer, or any one of a dozen other roles. But if you don't help out when the ship is threatening to sink you personally are breaking the social contract and endangering the ship.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You can change basic competency with weapons in 2e. One of the 2e campaigns I ran was based on the Deities and Demigods Celtic mythos. One of the specialty priests I ran was a priest of Diancecht, a pacifistic healer. Part of the package was a negation of to-hit increase -- they started on the Magic-User chart and didn't get better at combat as they leveled. They also didn't get any damaging spells on their spell list.

Another player built a Magic-User as a Diviner type that probably knew maybe 3 combat spells by the time the campaign ended (characters were ~9th level). He was focused on knowing and figuring out stuff.



Depending on initial choice you certainly can't transmogrify that way in 2e -- your specialty cleric is locked in and those choices can only change for the worse unless a major quest is undertaken to change deity. Even for Wizards, the cost of such transmogrification can be staggering if the character doesn't have the spells already in their books. In 1e that was even worse since spells known per level was a serious limit even for 18 Int characters.



I don't deny it. The focus of the game engines is different and that difference does leak into the character capabilities and expectations for play though. You can play similar campaigns in both versions, of course, but you'll find yourself fighting each system at different points.

Yeah, I don't totally disagree with you. I think things like your cleric that can't fight example are more examples of just "someone made this rule for 2e but not for 4e" because you could design the exact same class, presumably for any-E, the same way. 4e certainly is less amenable to something like "I really can't cast any combat spells", though I did make a wizard once as a test that made ALMOST no direct attacks. There were some levels where he couldn't really get an encounter spell that wasn't overtly an attack, but he did still manage to get ones that were 'less aggressive'. He had all daily powers that were effectively utilities though most of them COULD do some damage (IE things like Web). Its not QUITE the same as AD&D didn't segregate spell types, so you could literally take all utility spells if you so desired (and knew enough of them).

So, I think it is fair to say we can agree that there's a lot of overlap but the two games do diverge at some point. Honestly though, in all my years of running D&D (since 1975) I have run into an exceedingly small number, probably countable on one hand, of characters that really wouldn't work in 4e but did work in some other edition. They do exist, but I think 4e is closest to "make the adventurer you want", it just doesn't do "make the weird non-hero you want" too well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I came to a similar conclusion during my review of the game -- power wasn't the problem per se. Limited access to common trope abilities such as flight, long-distance travel, wide-ranging effects, and long-ranged attacks was.

For me, it was because I like and run superheroic games and I don't often run cinematic action-adventure games.

If you play high level 4e you can quite easily have a supers type game. In fact I'd say that's the intended path. The game starts with action heroes and then at some point they grow larger than just "larger than life" and become mystical figures. This is why Santiago works as a 4e-based thing. The skill/SC system also helps because its only very loosely connected to specific narrative. You can always set DCs such that lifting mountains or leaping 500' chasms is part and parcel for higher level PCs.

They were poor choices if the intent was to design a game closer to D&D roots where combat was a thing that was threatened constantly, happened frequently, but where the characters could and should work to limit it to fights of value.

Well, you have to design adventures a bit differently. I found it was quite easy to encourage the players to focus on the meaningful encounters and avoid the ones that were really SUPPOSED to be avoided. Then you can do fun things like give out some extra rewards to the party that is willing to go ahead and try to stretch their day that much further by killing the orc guards for their purses or whatever.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sorry, optional rule. But well it is a problem, when I get the chance to play on a house group I'm normally stuck dming If I want to play I need to look for pbp, vtt, or encounters. And it is normally easier to find a game the more you are willing to work within RAW, so if I want to play these kind of characters I have more luck by looking at not 4e, if you where to play with strangers who would you pick the player who wants to play the run of the mill sorcerer or the one who is asking you to work more to make room for a character who is normally not seen and goes against the spirit of the edition?

This whole thing with CDG and non-lethal damage doesn't seem to be a viable rules argument at all IMHO. In 2e and 3e non-lethal damage is a whole separate category, so if you and your party aren't all on the same page about what you're doing then your non-lethal combatant is actually just wasting time rolling dice because the other PCs will ignore your relatively small amount of non-lethal damage and just kill things. In 4e you likewise USUALLY have to have the cooperation of the strikers to leave enemies alive but defeated, so how is it really different? At least in 4e you MIGHT get the last shot in and KO someone, that will only happen in 2e/3e if you actually were fighting something wimpy enough that you one-shotted it.

1e didn't even HAVE a rule for non-lethal damage, nor did any version of D&D previous to it, though perhaps later iterations on BECMI had something, I just really never played beyond Mentzer Expert.

So, overall you have the same OUTCOMES in 4e as in previous-E, though the logic is a bit different. In none of these games is non-lethal blows the default, so I'm not even sure how you get that. A CDG is a special 4e move, and it CAN still be non-lethal. Also, 4e monsters may or may not DIE at 0 hit points in 4e, so there's always the option for the DM to say "yeah, that orc is unconscious, you can heal him if you want."