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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Tactics are just methods you use to win a battle. In order to win, you need to reduce the enemy's hitpoints to 0 before they reduce yours to 0. So tactics are, by definition, the methods you use in order to reduce their hitpoints while keeping yours up.


I don't think controller is well defined at all. It appears, if you examine all the controllers in the game and their abilities to be the role in which you either do lots of area of effect damage with no special effects at all, or you do single target crowd control with very little damage, or you do single target crowd control with lots of damage, or area of effect crowd control with very little damage, or abilities that allow you escape and protect yourself from damage, or you dispel area of effects that other people have put down. Which seems about as clear as mud.

Aren't "protecting yourself from damage" abilities the domain of the Defender? Isn't damage in general the domain of Strikers? Isn't dispelling a special effect the domain of Leaders?

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. If you cast a spell that prevents the next 35 damage dealt to an ally and an enemy attacks him and does 35 damage you've done precisely the same thing as if you stunned the enemy for a round. If you give the target -20 to hit and they miss, you've done precisely the same thing as stunning them for a round. If you do 200 points of damage in one hit and kill the enemy outright, you've not only accomplished the same thing as stunning them for a round, you've essentially stunned them for the rest of the game.

Which is precisely why all you really need to worry about is damage. It's why our party of strikers not only did just as well as a balanced party, they finished combats in half the time.

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.

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.

Well, we will just have to agree to disagree. The awesomeness of a highly skilled tactician in the controller role showing how he could break any plan was thrilling (and a bit frustrating as DM of course, but that's cool). It wasn't AT ALL about doing piddly area damage or especially about crowd control. It could be about making new terrain, or denying ground to the enemy that they needed in order to win, or just delaying the enemy by a round so your party reached its goal first. It was always rather pivotal. The only types of fights that controllers are not that great for are dull boring knock-downs with very little terrain or dynamic evolving situation at all. That's just poor encounter design though. Even then a skilled wizard will do quite well.

Your example of an AoE in 4e seems quite wrong to me. THE CLASSIC is the old "Stinking Cloud, OK boys they're coming out, SHOVE 'EM BACK IN!" etc. Nothing is better than a persistent damaging zone, those things are tactical GOLD. Obviously if you have a group that just has no tactical sense of anything at all, then sure, all tactical goodness will just pass them by. THAT group should just avoid combat.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I am beginning to think that the Defender role doesn't truly exist in reality.

This is probably controversial because the knight with shield is a core iconic image. But if you look at a fight with multiple roles, the most logical thing for an enemy to do is ignore the defender and attack one of the other three roles.

No, it's not. If there is a defender, the enemy is caught between a rock and a hard place.

That's why it's good the role is called "Defender" and not "Tank". A tank is best ignored, because all he does is soak damage.
But a Defender does more - he soaks damage, but he also punishes you for not attacking him. A Defender is as deadly as a Striker if you ignore him. You can't "win" by ignoring him, he'll stab you dead, or take away your damage, stop you in your tracks, doesn't let you go away, or teleport you to places you did not want to be (whatever flavor of Defender you have).

I think there is nothing more artificial about the defender abilites then there is about sneak attack or curses.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I think there is nothing more artificial about the defender abilities then there is about sneak attack or curses.

The mechanics of a 4e fighter are stop-motion, turn-based combat. But the fiction is of a fluid combat situation comparable to real life. So within the fiction, interrupts, OAs and the like are just part of the ebb-and-flow of combat.

So in the fiction, a fighter is a viciously opportunistic combatant who is less of a threat if you turn and face him/her down. You can like or not like that fiction, but it doesn't strike me as any more "artificial" then any other story element in the game.

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.

This seems to me to be a sign of weakness in the underlying mechanics. There is nothing at all objectionable about a an arcane-trickster wizard who turn invisible and then throws dangerous "bombs" at enemies. (It reminds me of the sorts of villains the Flash used to fight back in the day, like Toyman and The Top.)

The sorcerer in my 4e game is a bit like this - Invisibility from a ring, drowish Cloud of Darkness, etc - though he doesn't so much through bombs as blast with lightning and thunder.

If 3E doesn't let this sort of PC work because of action economy issues, that's a strike against 3E in my book. It makes me feel sorry for your friend, who had a perfectly reasonable PC concept but couldn't make it work because of somewhat arbitrary limits in the mechanics.

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.

We have had different experiences, then. The players in my game often surprise me by fighting people I thought they might talk to, or talking to people I thought they would fight. In our session this Sunday just past, they struck a deal with a demon rather than kill it (which they could have fairly easily done), because they wanted to send it ahead of them to sow death and terror among their enemies.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Just to reinforce something I said earlier and that is how 4e defenders (should) work:

Strikers are not the most dangerous people on the battlefield, defenders are. If the enemy wants to take down the most dangerous person on the battlefield that's the defender, not the striker. But denying defenders interrupts is like denying rogues Sneak Attack; it makes them a whole lot less dangerous than at full power, and it's much easier to do even than denying Sneak Attack.

(Now Paladins and Shielding/Ensnaring Swordmages are exceptions).

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

This seems to me to be a sign of weakness in the underlying mechanics. There is nothing at all objectionable about a an arcane-trickster wizard who turn invisible and then throws dangerous "bombs" at enemies. (It reminds me of the sorts of villains the Flash used to fight back in the day, like Toyman and The Top.)

The sorcerer in my 4e game is a bit like this - Invisibility from a ring, drowish Cloud of Darkness, etc - though he doesn't so much through bombs as blast with lightning and thunder.

If 3E doesn't let this sort of PC work because of action economy issues, that's a strike against 3E in my book. It makes me feel sorry for your friend, who had a perfectly reasonable PC concept but couldn't make it work because of somewhat arbitrary limits in the mechanics.

The problem is that it isn't just 3e. It's been every edition since the beginning of time. Hitpoints being the measurement that is used to determine the results of battle means any round you are NOT doing hitpoint damage is a round you are wasting. 4e realized this and made almost every power do hitpoint damage in addition to having a secondary effect. This allowed you to always be moving the enemies closer to dying no matter what you did and just trade a little bit of your damage for some other useful effect. Say what you will about 4e, but this was a good idea.

We have had different experiences, then. The players in my game often surprise me by fighting people I thought they might talk to, or talking to people I thought they would fight. In our session this Sunday just past, they struck a deal with a demon rather than kill it (which they could have fairly easily done), because they wanted to send it ahead of them to sow death and terror among their enemies.

I don't know. I run entirely adventures entirely written by other people. Living Forgotten Realms, D&D Encounters, Living Greyhawk, bought adventures(I'm running Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle), adventures of Dungeon Magazine. The one thing they all have in common is that the combat encounters are set up to be nearly unavoidable. The bad guys are BAD and have tons of reasons not to negotiate with anyone. Better to kill the PCs and be done with it rather than negotiate.

 

[pemerton]

The problem is that it isn't just 3e. It's been every edition since the beginning of time. Hitpoints being the measurement that is used to determine the results of battle means any round you are NOT doing hitpoint damage is a round you are wasting. 4e realized this and made almost every power do hitpoint damage in addition to having a secondary effect.

But the problem for your friend is not that s/he is not doing hp damage. It is that setting up (invisibility, movement) is treated too harshly in the action economy. The sorcerer in my 4e game turns invisible as a minor action (Ring), flies to a suitable vantage point as a move action (Dominant Winds) and then unleashes many many hit points of damage (standard action attack power).

I run entirely adventures entirely written by other people.

<snip>

The bad guys are BAD and have tons of reasons not to negotiate with anyone. Better to kill the PCs and be done with it rather than negotiate.

My NPCs will tend to try and negotiate when things are looking bad for them, which is quite often! Sometimes it works (like the demon I mentioned); sometimes it doesn't (Calastryx tried to negotiate, but the player of the fighter replied, both in character and to the group, "This three-headed monster is going down!").

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

Our group's Fighter would throw himself off the airship if he only hit for 1d8+7 damage with a 50% chance to hit an even-level enemy. That's dire. Good grief. If you have AC32 (so, early teens levels) and you're hitting that light and that unreliably, as a Fighter, something is very seriously wrong.

But your whole argument is predicated on a abjectly false assumption, not just odd numbers - that being that you can choose whether you "let the Rogue live". You can't. You do not hit hard enough to one-shot him, or even one-round him, and there is a good chance your attacks on him will miss.

What your REAL choice is "Do I TRY to HURT the Rogue in the HOPE that he will be incapacitated before he gets to hit me again, but likely incur EXTRA damage right now or do I hit the Fighter and hope that piling on him will get him down, leaving my side free to rampage?".

Neither is a good choice - but that's the point - the Fighter makes sure you only have crap choices. As someone who has DM'd this party for a long time, and is tactically adept if I do say so myself (I'm very good at strategy games, chess, etc. - never played Go, admittedly), I can tell you that the real, in-game situation is very often that it is better to pound on the Fighter and try and take him out of the action (which can be done), than try to hammer the Rogue if he is around (and if he is around, the Leader will be not too far off either).

The time you wallop the Rogue is when he idiotically overextends trying to get a flashy kill.

As for your comments on Controller, I will say this - Controllers played by people who don't understand how to cooperate, and who don't understand tactics are a menace to their own side (in any RPG) - however, those people almost never, in my experience, choose to play Controllers. Of the Controllers I've seen in 4E, all of them were played by very adept team-player tacticians, and they absolutely DESTROYED my ability to achieve anything in the encounter as a DM, without preventing the other PCs from smacking the enemies silly, because they knew when and when not to use their powers (and one of them was certainly willing to cause other PCs to take a bit of damage if, in the grand scheme of things, that worked out - which is fine, I think). But yes, knowing when NOT to cast certain spells is important to Controlling. All of the roles in 4E (and indeed most roles in most things) require a bit of skill to handle really well.

Furthermore, with Controllers, unless the player in question is fundamentally, hopelessly beyond all help, they will learn from mistakes.

Thus if they put a wall down and screw up the party more than the enemy, that will be the last time they screw up like that. If they keep making the same mistakes, frankly, no game is going to be able to help them.

 

[Nagol]

Just to reinforce something I said earlier and that is how 4e defenders (should) work:

Strikers are not the most dangerous people on the battlefield, defenders are. If the enemy wants to take down the most dangerous person on the battlefield that's the defender, not the striker. But denying defenders interrupts is like denying rogues Sneak Attack; it makes them a whole lot less dangerous than at full power, and it's much easier to do even than denying Sneak Attack.

(Now Paladins and Shielding/Ensnaring Swordmages are exceptions).

If Defenders are the most dangerous people on the battlefield, what role do you envision for Strikers?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If Defenders are the most dangerous people on the battlefield, what role do you envision for Strikers?

The most deadly.

 

[Nagol]

The problem is that it isn't just 3e. It's been every edition since the beginning of time. Hitpoints being the measurement that is used to determine the results of battle means any round you are NOT doing hitpoint damage is a round you are wasting. 4e realized this and made almost every power do hitpoint damage in addition to having a secondary effect. This allowed you to always be moving the enemies closer to dying no matter what you did and just trade a little bit of your damage for some other useful effect. Say what you will about 4e, but this was a good idea.


I don't know. I run entirely adventures entirely written by other people. Living Forgotten Realms, D&D Encounters, Living Greyhawk, bought adventures(I'm running Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle), adventures of Dungeon Magazine. The one thing they all have in common is that the combat encounters are set up to be nearly unavoidable. The bad guys are BAD and have tons of reasons not to negotiate with anyone. Better to kill the PCs and be done with it rather than negotiate.

Although I generally agree with you, there are situations where the goals of the situation do not involve dropping the enemy to 0 ASAP.

They are rare, but somewhat under the control of the players.

One campaign I ran was Thief-focused; all the players built the Thief class into their characters. Their belief was if they were in a fight, they already screwed up.

I can think of a bunch of situation where the goal wasn't to defeat the enemy, but to retrieve something/someone. All the group had to do was survive long enough to put hands on their target and leave usually via Teleport. There was one epic adventure in particular where the PCs were rescuing Artemis from the clutches of Hades. All the PCs had to do was survive long enough to convince her to stand up (she was in his chair of forgetfulness).

It becomes hp attrition in the absence of a stronger goal for the situation.