D&D 5E What are the Roles now?

[GMforPowergamers]

This is not the same thing as saying Roles don't exist. It just means that 4e is the only edition of D&D where, by design, roles directly associated with class. And that was a very deliberate design decision in both 4e and 5e.

yea, in the 4e phb each class had a role (and each had two subclasses with sub role too but skip that for now) one of the draw backs was that ment we had to split classes for no reason... that did get better later in 4e when you saw fighter strikers and warlock controlers and ranger controlers and all sorts of fun with mix and match.

5e took this and ran with it. The roles exsist, but multi roles can be options in a class... lets take fighter... taking two weapon or two handed weapon and champion sub class makes a great striker. the battle master is supposed to be both controller and leader (I am unsure but we shall see). This is great. It means that we can choose a role and a class... now I am a bit disappointed in backgrounds, but it is a big leap forward....

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

right... so to explain how I picked it... 5th level is too low to rely on magic items so I went 16 start + 1 at 4th +4 for rageing... so techinly 23, but only even numbers matter so 22...

I never knew a barbarian who would play with less than 18 at start, and quite a few liked to use racials to bump it up to 20. Having such a big hit die generally meant you could afford to not invest as much into Constitution.

not every time... but as often if not more so then the barbarian can rage... remember daily limit.

I never seen a rogue manage to use stealth attacks anywhere near the frequency that barbarians raged, and most of the people I talked with said it really wasn't something that came up often. While it was theoretically possible, in actual play they found the right combat scenario didn't come up much.

nope... not buying it at all... anytime you faced any humoide (orc, goblin, kobold, human, elf, giant) you only needed to flank... not matter how many times they "Spot you" so the two character Barbarian and rogue run up and flank and bad guy can "Spot" the rogue all the way to sneak attack land....

This is a trap tactic. Most recorded rogue deaths seen in any group I ever talked to or played with from attempting sneak attacks were from attempting to flank. The low health die rogues have, light armor they have to wear to be anything close to effective at their class skills, and the existence of the Attack of Opportunity generally spelled rogue death if they ever tried to flank. And that's assuming they were in a combat scenario where flanking was even a viable possibility.

the barbrain that can only rage x times per day???

The number of times per day and the stat bonuses from rage both increased. And for most groups, five times per day covered the entire adventuring day as far as combat went.

You know I was glade when some ress to SA was removed (a lot of undead and constructs should not be immune) but I can't imagin a campaign where SA was so useless AND the player kept taking rogue levels...

Most dedicated rogues built their characters as trapfinders and skill monkeys. Basically, the strength of the class as they played it laid entirely outside of combat. A lot of rogues multi-classed or focused on prestige classes.

Which is why I am very glad to see such a design did not make it into 5E.

 

[SirAntoine]

to all of you that think that striker is gone, and those of you that think striker wasn't in 3e... or 2e for that matter I have a question about rogue/thief.

Lets say I sit at your table (2e,3e,4e doesn't matter, and it just surprised someone in my 5e character creation night) and I say I'm making a social rogue that isn't very good in a fight. I don't really know how to stab people, I just am a face and a sly trickster... as the game levels how do you keep that feel?

when we made characters Tuesday night the player in question found himself having (with only leather armor and a dagger) was the 2nd best AC, 2nd best HP, good attack, and most important highest melee and ranged weapon damage potential in the game...

in 2e if you strike from hiding (and later if you flank... now in 5th if another player is attacking that target) you deal extra damage. x2 and later x3 damage enough to be more then a critical... later editions changed that to +xd6 sneak attack...

in my Tuesday night game that striker feature is at +3d6... the rogue had a 14 Dex (not high at all) and the fighter with an 18 str and an axe is doing less damage if both engage the target... 1d10+4 (9.5) compared to 1d4+3d6+2 (14.5)

I mean even if you don't like the word striker (witch in this context means doing good single target burst damage) then you have to admit the rogue and even the thief was always built to do good single target burst damage, and as far as I know has no option not to...

Let me see if I have your question right. You want to know how to keep the feel of a social rogue who isn't very good in a fight?

Level advancement will improve your ability naturally, but you don't have to play the character like he is aware of it. If a monster corners you, then you'll be able to defend yourself better, but you try to stay out of fights and don't think highly of your ability to fight. You focus on trying to develop social skills and you lay plans behind the scenes. So basically, you will lend a hand to your team-mates with untrained actions most of the time, and they know to look to you to cut a deal or bluff your way past the guards.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Let me see if I have your question right. You want to know how to keep the feel of a social rogue who isn't very good in a fight?

no the question is what happens to the system...The exact question was at the game level how do you keep that feel... Maybe I should have said "WHat do you do at a rules level for a character who has no reason to know how to sneak attack?, but you do answer that...

Level advancement will improve your ability naturally, but you don't have to play the character like he is aware of it. If a monster corners you, then you'll be able to defend yourself better, but you try to stay out of fights and don't think highly of your ability to fight. You focus on trying to develop social skills and you lay plans behind the scenes. So basically, you will lend a hand to your team-mates with untrained actions most of the time, and they know to look to you to cut a deal or bluff your way past the guards.

so the system works best if I ignore it... OK, well I can ignore the striker feature (sneak attack or backstab) in 1e, 2e, 3e, 4e, or 5e... but of course that isn't the game that's just house ruling and has nothing to do with if there are roles... that would be like if I said "Well I can bring the mark and combat superiority from 4e into the 5e fighter and give him them instead of the extra attacks... that means defender"

this entire thread has gone off the rails now... we started with

"What are the roles in 5e"

and a bunch of people gave their opinions, and I made what is quickly becoming a mistake by saying "Same ones there always was Defender Striker Controller Leader"

right away people made sure to tell me how wrong I was those roles never exsisted and never will in 5e... so I tried to explain why I thought they had never changed... and we went around and around and around...

but here we are back to ten pages ago or so...

The roles are not force on anyone (they weren't in 4e either) they are guides to play the game and help to understand why some classes have some features... my example above is one that came up at my table... and one I heard through out 3e as well. SOme people don't understand what would make a con man or a thief or almost any other non skimisher know just the right places to hit for more damage... wouldn't you think a combat trained soldier and warrior (like a fighter) would be more likely to be able to explote the advantage. My version is that it is a game conceat, a striker feature from way back that does not fit the "We gave them what makes sense" paradigm... but nothing I say will ever convince any of you.

so fine the evil words are gone... nothing in the book explains why anything is there... why can bards and clerics heal but not wizards... reasons... why do all rogue no matter what style learn martial study of landing the right blow when they can, but not any other combat class... it's just simplistic none explained class design...

I still stand by my orginal answer...

The role didn't change, they are just hidden now instead of out in the open.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

"What are the roles in 5e"

and a bunch of people gave their opinions, and I made what is quickly becoming a mistake by saying "Same ones there always was Defender Striker Controller Leader"

right away people made sure to tell me how wrong I was those roles never exsisted and never will in 5e... so I tried to explain why I thought they had never changed... and we went around and around and around...

To be honest, I had no intentions of arguing with what you said on the first page; as far as I was concerned, it wasn't my place to consider your advice.

And then someone had to argue with you about it, and here we are 18 pages later...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Forgive me for not having read all 20 pages of this thread (only the first 4 or so), but one thing that I didn't see mentioned was that class "roles" are a construct for the game designers. D&D has had roles of a sort at least as far back as AD&D 2nd edition, which is as far as my experience goes. For example, you would have gotten pushback from most DMs if you wanted to research a 3rd level cleric spell that does the same AoE damage as Fireball, and you would likewise have gotten pushback if you wanted a 1st level wizard spell that healed like Cure Light Wounds. There was some kind of implicit role there that said, "Wizards shouldn't be about healing, and clerics shouldn't be about nuking." It was always possible to achieve the same goals (Flame Strike) but never as efficiently.

Now, the mere fact that roles existed in the minds of TSR and most DMs doesn't mean it's easy to figure out what they were, but I'll venture a couple of guesses:

* Clerics: healing, anti-undead, spiritual divination (i.e. asking a higher power), and sanctification (Bless/Prayer/Chant spells to grant divine favor) were all within the cleric's role. The Tome of Magic greatly expanded clerical roles into domains like Mathematics, Travel, and Mental.
* Wizards: evocation, illusion, mind control, summoning/teleportation were within the wizard's role, as well as certain kinds of direct divination (i.e. seeking out information through magic).
* Fighters: killing things to death all day long.
* Rogues: sneaking into places you aren't wanted without being seen; disarming traps.
* Druids: anything involving animals or plants; a touch of healing and cleric-like divinations.
* Psionicist: manipulating/transforming your own body; ESP; mind control; teleportation; telekinesis and manipulation of kinetic energy.

Etc. Sometimes these roles would change in a given setting: Athasian fire clerics probably wouldn't bat an eyelash at doing Fireball-like damage, although it would probably be considered bad form to have a spell that acted exactly like Fireball. Another dimension of variability is that the role of spellcasters vs. fighters is all about versatility or nova vs. consistency--in 2nd edition, there was no better PC for fighting all day long than a fighter with good stats and a Ring of Vampiric Regeneration which lets you regain HP from killing things, but no DM would ever have been insane enough (I hope) to create a Ring of Vampiric Spell Regeneration which restored spell slots from killing things: consistency is not a wizard's role (until very, very high levels) and therefore not in the idiom. This is also what distinguished Knock from the Open Locks percentage that Thieves had.

It should be readily apparent that these roles have very little to do with MMO-style roles, which are only about differentiating classes in combat. AD&D treated combat as only one subcomponent of "adventuring" as an activity. Information gathering, travel, negotiation/trade, rest, and of course logistics management were all important too. Furthermore, the implicit roles seem to have been about the "how" as much as the "what". A cleric spell that does massive damage to undead with holy fire would be fine, but a cleric spell that does massive damage to undead via telepathic screaming would have been bizarre and wrong--no matter that a MMO player would call both of these things "striking" or "crowd control". Holy fire is in the cleric's idiom, but telepathy is for psionicists. That sounds like a role to me, from the game designer perspective.

 

[SirAntoine]

OK, I'm not following. You're implying that the striker was in 2e, but your example is not from 2e. I'm assuming 5e? How does a 5e example prove that a thief was a striker in 2e?


Because in my experience, a thief wasn't a striker in 2e. He/she was a skill monkey. Master of exploration (a full 1/3rd of the game). Occassionally they could do significant damage with backstab, but that was pretty rare in the context of total combat rounds. Nothing like 5e where they can apply sneak attack damage pretty much every attack.

In TSR D&D, you didn't play a thief because you wanted to be one of the highest damage dealers. You played one because you wanted utility. The ability to get in, get out, find stuff, disappear when needed, without needing to rely on highly limited magic. You played one if being a spy, scout, or scoundrel appealed to you.

That is all part of the thief, or rogue, to this day, more so than striker from 4e.

 

[SirAntoine]

We basically agree! My mantra here is just to point out that BECAUSE folks come at this from different angles, the folks who feel like 4e's roles were inevitable things and the folks who feel like 4e's roles were aberrant and alien are both (1) totally correct from their own perspective, and (2) totally wrong when they speak in terms of generalities. So it's not like one side or the other is "more right" or anything. If we all acknowledge the variation here, it can help us better define what distinguishes our games and makes them special, without taking or delivering statements that get people's dander in a ruffle.

I don't think it's all just a matter of opinion. The 4e roles were invented when that edition was published, in 2008 I believe. So for the first 34 years of D&D, they didn't exist yet.

 

[SirAntoine]

in 2e (my first D&D experience)
theif as above so I don't think I have to go over it again

you had fighters and palidens (almost never saw those in play) who where tough and up front combatants who were always in the front line... they could take more then there share of hits and had best AC and best to hit... 9/10th of the time they did the best damage over the course of the fight as well

you had CLeric and Druid who were almost as tough as the fighter, and had spells... spells change the game it gives you WAY more in the way of variability... but both were mostly (not entirely) used to heal and buff...

you had Ranger who was somewhere inbetween the fighter and the druid... with a little rogue thrown in... it was very weird.

you had bard... it made the ranger look like it fit... it had wizard spells and theif attack but not the backstab... and less skills but more knowledge...

then you had wizard... it was the worst AC, and HP, and often I saw ones that even at 4th or 5th level could be one shoted. they had few spells per day (no bonus spells form high Int) and buff spells with bad riders (haste) or attack spells that could back fire (Enveration) but once you got them going and to a highish level they started to change the whole game... both the most powerful/versitle class and the weakest/most railroad calss depending on the level...

(Now I had Ninja, Barbarian, and Psion books to add but I'll skip that inless someone really feels those or chronomancer matter)

in 3e ALOT changed...
fighter's and Palidens took a bit of a cut in power, Rogues (not thieves anymore) lost out on being only skill users but gained ALOT of combat (sneak attack+uncanny dodge really made them a skimisher), the cleric got more variability and some up grades that really made them more versitle (never have to prep a healing spell), and Druids got OP... the wizard was weird, at the same time it gained more spells and new ways to cast them, and took away those draw backs... we then added the barbrain, monk and sorcerer...

both 2e and 3e gave you a lot of customization (more so 3e) but at the end of the day both were made with the 4-5 man team in mind... a fighter a mage a cleric a thief and a 5th wheel. Now could your fighter be a ranger in eaith...yup... could you go with just 5 wizards... yea. could you multi and duil class you betcha... but again the base line was one thing and you could change it to be another..


so what did 4e look at... the 4-5 man party, the fighter the mage the cleri and the thief... and what did they bring to the table in and out of combat... lets look at combat the fighter stood up and fought in the front line, the thief (if he waded in at all) moved to get one big blow, the cleric healed and buffed, the wizard through spells... so they said "OK how do we break those down so multi classes can fit each one?"

now if you think roles needed to be done better, I agree...especially if you just take phb1.
If you think they were made up based on nothing that came before... I don't get how you came to that...

4e defined expectations for combat in new ways, and used words that mean other things.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

To be honest, I had no intentions of arguing with what you said on the first page; as far as I was concerned, it wasn't my place to consider your advice.

And then someone had to argue with you about it, and here we are 18 pages later...

that's the funny part, this whole thing takes on a life of it's own... I doubt the people from the beging are even all here any more... I say something, someone says something back then I chip in again... and because the edition change and war is such a hot topic sooner or later someone who didn't plan on it sees something and jumps in on one side or another and the whole thing snow balls.

I think we stoped actually discussing anything posts ago... and it's worse because somepeople say things new and then get group in as tempers rise... so I am going to try to take a deep breath and start over.

I don't want to fight I like discussing the evolution of the game, and we all agree it did evolve...sometimes for good other times not so good... but it changed.

Forgive me for not having read all 20 pages of this thread (only the first 4 or so), but one thing that I didn't see mentioned was that class "roles" are a construct for the game designers.

yea, but they can also be sign posts for both DMs and Players... and to be honest with a paper and pad game like D&D the important part is you and your DM/players being on the same page... not me here in Connecticut.

D&D has had roles of a sort at least as far back as AD&D 2nd edition, which is as far as my experience goes. For example, you would have gotten pushback from most DMs if you wanted to research a 3rd level cleric spell that does the same AoE damage as Fireball, and you would likewise have gotten pushback if you wanted a 1st level wizard spell that healed like Cure Light Wounds.

yea, I often wonder why the divide the way it was... I mean healing magic in stories and myth is as likely to come from any source...but that's another topic.

There was some kind of implicit role there that said, "Wizards shouldn't be about healing, and clerics shouldn't be about nuking." It was always possible to achieve the same goals (Flame Strike) but never as efficiently.

yup... some of those roles where starting in 1e and basic too from my understanding

* Clerics: healing, anti-undead, spiritual divination (i.e. asking a higher power), and sanctification (Bless/Prayer/Chant spells to grant divine favor) were all within the cleric's role. The Tome of Magic greatly expanded clerical roles into domains like Mathematics, Travel, and Mental.

a lot of there spells that weren't shared (like dispel and most divinations) where buffs or restores but a few good combat... a lot of the leader role comes from here.

* Wizards: evocation, illusion, mind control, summoning/teleportation were within the wizard's role, as well as certain kinds of direct divination (i.e. seeking out information through magic).

again I'll skip shared spells, and yea powerful debuffs, save or dies, crowd control, creation, summon/teleport... by the end of 3e they were all over the place but in the beginning of 2e they had a lot of limits.

* Fighters: killing things to death all day long.

I often argue with my MMO playing friends that Tanks have big guns... and Fighters were tanks. They were heavy armor heavy weapon and deadly. I honestly rarely saw people play "Meat shields" and often saw "Kick but warriors" back in the day.

* Rogues: sneaking into places you aren't wanted without being seen; disarming traps.

a lot of the exploration got shared in this area...but again what they gave them for combat was a big hitting hard to get off attack (backstab) later (in 3e) that became more of there place as combat become more important (again 3e)

* Druids: anything involving animals or plants; a touch of healing and cleric-like divinations.

I always got the feeling that druids were just variant clerics... but yea they had more specialized things...

* Psionicist: manipulating/transforming your own body; ESP; mind control; teleportation; telekinesis and manipulation of kinetic energy.

using the 2e psionics handbook for my myth and magic game that book was all over the place... I don't think they knew what they wanted to do with it. (I do still have a soft spot for it though in my heart)

It should be readily apparent that these roles have very little to do with MMO-style roles, which are only about differentiating classes in combat.

that not really true... the classes do have combat roles even back then... Clerics (as you point out) don't throw fireballs as a rule, and Wizards don't break enchantments or cure light wounds. Fighter don't position them self for one big shot, they run in and are more reliable...

the move to 3e did change a lot (sneak attack doesn't equal back stab) and some classes got big boosts (Bonus spells and spell negatives removed) well other lost ground ( taking penalties to ideritve attacks hurt fighters..._)

AD&D treated combat as only one subcomponent of "adventuring" as an activity. Information gathering, travel, negotiation/trade, rest, and of course logistics management were all important too. Furthermore, the implicit roles seem to have been about the "how" as much as the "what". A cleric spell that does massive damage to undead with holy fire would be fine, but a cleric spell that does massive damage to undead via telepathic screaming would have been bizarre and wrong--no matter that a MMO player would call both of these things "striking" or "crowd control".

flavor and role go together.... sometimes I think some MMO players don't even pay attention to the fluff part...